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!

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!

Making Sense of the Central Idea

This week, the central idea of our first unit was revealed: 

Our mindsets and understanding of the process of learning enable us to build skills and habits to reach our goals.  

We looked at different chunks of the central idea and considered what the words meant, made connections, and drew illustrations of our visualizations. 

Once we made sense of the four sections of the central idea, we got together in groups to rewrite it in our own words. Check out what Miles' group came up with! You can see the rewritten central ideas by the other groups on the pink slips on the photo above. 

We also used a visible thinking routine called 3, 2, 1 Bridge to reflect on how our understanding of the word "learning" changed before and after watching the video below. 

Our understanding of learning changed as we found out that our brains are malleable, meaning that they can stretch and grow like muscles! 

This realization led to our research about the concept of a growth mindset using our newly learned skill of sketchnoting. 

This visual note-taking strategy helps us as the dual-coding theory suggests that our brains process information more effectively when both verbal associations and visual imagery are being used.

Take a look at how we processed our learning in different ways by making various connections! 

We watched this video and this video as well as other resources we found through our own investigation. 

 

One-pagers

 

We are finally back on campus full-time!

During the first two days of school, we created one-pagers as we considered the question: How can we express ourselves effectively using texts and visuals?

We had a discussion about how important it is to keep checking the success criteria that we created as a class while also asking ourselves, "Is this my best work"?

The ability to self-monitor our own progress through regular and active reflection is especially important in Grades 5 and 6 and we will continue to work on this skill throughout the year. 

In order to create the one-pagers, we first created a draft design, reflected while giving and receiving feedback, and finally produced our final pieces. 

Some of the questions we considered are the following:

• What makes you unique?
• What has really affected your heart?
• What secrets have you kept in your heart that you don't mind sharing?
• What are some experiences or central events you will never forget?
• What are your hopes, dreams, and goals?

"Is this my best work? How can I make it even better?"

Natalia created a plan for her plan in her mini-journal as you can see in the photo.  

Check out our final one-pagers below!

Have a good weekend!

Totem Poles

Last week, our first unit with the following central idea came to an end: 

our beliefs and values help impact the choices we make. 

As a way to explore and express our own beliefs and values, 

we worked on a project of designing 3D art which is inspired by totem poles!

Totem poles are an important part of the culture of First Nation people on the Western coast of North America. Totem poles serve many purposes such as representing stories or important events as well as celebrating cultural beliefs. 

In this project, we first came up with various qualities that we value. 

For example, some of us chose honesty, wisdom and bravery as qualities which are important to us. 

We then thought of animals which we believe to represent such qualities.

Next, we used Lego blocks to construct rectangular prisms. 

Then, we used these 3D shapes to create nets for each animal to put on our totem poles. This was a challenging process since we needed to picture how 2D shapes make up the sides of a 3D shape!

Once our nets were completed, we drew our chosen animals from various perspectives. 

It was important to think about how different shapes would look like when they were seen from the front, top, left, right, and behind. 

Here are some of the finished totem poles!

See you next week :)