Personal Projects and Action

 

Hello everyone! 

We spent a week towards the end of our Who We Are unit to work on personal projects on topics that matter to us. 

Each of us chose an inquiry question to guide our research. 

We made sure to...

•  use at least two sources (G5) / three sources (G6) from the unit Padlet
• make my creation neat, clear, and well organised 
• make my creation informative
•  included my sources (MLA for Grade 6)

Below, you can see the process of our learning. 

We all ended up posing questions related to LGBTQ+ and many of us chose to take action in unique ways. 

We even created our own thumbnails for the videos we created as well. 

Take a look at these amazing displays! 

Clara and Tina's Project:

Markus and Fabiano's Project:

Jose and Suguri's Project:

Thoma and Brandon's Project: 

Tomoharu and Hirohito's Project:

Click here to access a website created by Tomoharu and Hirohito

Nanoka and Claire's Project:

We have a full unit wall and have just started our long-awaited drama unit!

So exciting!

Personal Narrative Writing

In Grades 5 and 6, we have been working on a personal narrative writing unit. 

As authors, we increased our self-management skills as we worked through the writing process of planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing. 

This week, we had a book celebration to proudly share our books with our classmates. 

You can also see the students reading their books out loud on Seesaw Blog. 

Below, we are posting the cover and first page of each book. 

Our books are displayed on the first floor in the entrance area!

Author: Jose

Author: Tina

Author: Markus

Author: Brandon

Author: Nanoka

Author: Claire

Author: Tomoharu

Author: Suguri

Author: Hirohito

In the posters below, you can also see some of the strategies and techniques we learned during this unit. 

Have a great weekend!

Advent Calendar

 

Thank you, PTA for the lovely Advent Calendar!

St. Martin's Day

This week we celebrated St. Martin's Day! In music class, we sang songs we had secretly prepared for our classroom teacher. Surprise!

 

Discussion About George by Alex Gino

 Hello everyone!

In Grades 5 and 6, we are several weeks into our unit on Who We Are with the following Central Idea: 

Our sexuality and experiences during puberty help us understand ourselves and others. 

We started to explore the idea of gender identity and have been reading a book called George written by Alex Gino - a story about a girl who was born in a boy's body. In other words, the protagonist is transgender as her gender identity does not match her biological sex. 

To prepare for this book club meeting, we each came up with open-ended questions which we then narrowed down by voting on which questions would lead to deeper learning. 

Here are the questions we chose:

• Why did George keep the fact that she is a girl a secret?
• If George tells people that she wants to be a girl, then what might happen?
• How might the other characters react when they find out George is a girl?

We used some of the following sentence starters as tools to help us be effective communicators. 

We had a discussion that lasted over twenty minutes with minimal support from our teacher. 

Click below to take a look!

Designing a Building in a Particular City

In Grades 5 and 6, we have been inquiring into how architects design buildings. 

As architects, we designed buildings with the following two questions in mind:

• How will natural laws, materials, and communities influence my design?

• How will the construction of my building impact communities and the environment?

During this project, we used our thinking skills (application to multiple contexts). This means that we applied the knowledge and understanding obtained from our unit to local and global contexts. 

Here is a description of the task: 

As an architect, you have been asked by a client to design a building in a particular city. 

As you design and construct a model of your building using paper, think about natural laws, materials, and community and how they will influence your building. Also, explain the connection between your building and the context, community, and environment. 

We first spent some time in teams researching about the particular city and what makes it unique, finding out information about the available space, population density, climate, culture, poverty rate, and so on. 

This information can be found on each group's poster. 

Take a look at our awesome creations!

Tourist Information Center in San Marco, Venice

Business Building in Manhattan, New York

Shopping mall on Orchard Road, Singapore

Cafe in Gion, Kyoto

 Have a great weekend!