How can our community become more sustainable?
Science
One of the most critical global issues of our time is how to live in ways that will sustain our planet’s systems and resources. In this unit, students investigated what it means to live in a sustainable world.
Most sustainability problems are a result of people’s overuse and misuse of the earth’s resources. The environmental, economic, and social consequences of unsustainable practice affect us on all levels—individually, locally, and globally. In this unit, students identified sustainability challenges in towns, countries, and larger regions around the world. They learned about communities that have applied scientific knowledge and technology to address their local resource challenges. They estimated the impact of their own lifestyle on the ecological sustainability of the planet. Finally, they applied the fundamentals of scientific inquiry to investigate a city facing a sustainability dilemma. The evidence gathered was used to suggest a course of action for the community.
English
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
This quarter, students were introduced to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These goals were developed as an "urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing" to create and maintain a "blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future" (United Nations).
To promote student choice, students picked one of the 17 SDGs as the focus of their project. During the quarter, they gathered research about that SDG reporting on what led the U.N. to focus on that issue, how that issue affects our community, and how "we" can attain that goal.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW ESSAY SAMPLES
UN SDG INFOGRAPHIC
Along with their essay, students created infographics that emphasized information gathered during their research process.
History
in History, we looked over the controversy surrounding Federalism and worked to understand how power is shared, distributed and contested within the State and Federal Government. Students took famous court cases that questioned the say and role of government as it works to resolve issues related to the American people (i.e., Health Care, Education, Immigration, etc.) Students worked to understand the Case and write a persuasive essay about their chosen topic. Below are samples of the essays.
Math 2021-22 (Statistics)
In statistics class, we have been building a foundation and an understanding of the basics. We have learned how to represent things with graph and tables. We have learned a lot about measures of centrality and measures of variability. We have been learning about probability and normal curves. This is extremely important as we move towards the second semester and do hypothesis testing. We have one major project in this class which we will show in the 4th quarter. Here is a minor project where we examine weighted averages and grade point averages. The other was a probability project.
Living Math (12th Grade)
In this class, we focus on the math that is most visible to us in every day life. That means we started this year with some geometric principals- these include geometric constructions and rigid transformations (reflections, rotations, translations). We did not exactly answer the question "how can our communities become more sustainable", but we did create some really cool shapes using a compass and ruler, allowing the hexagons and circles created to be perfectly regular (all angles the same, all side lengths the same).
As we dive deeper into geometric principals, we'll study congruency and similarity, using all sorts of triangles to understand how different shapes relate to one another.