Happy long weekend, division 2! Here are some recent highlights from our classroom. We have put up a new bulletin board of “Collaborative Sci-Fi Story Writing”.
This display showcases the results of a creative writing exercise where students wrote a compelling first line of a story with a time traveling theme or science fiction elements. Then they passed the story on to another student to write the second line, and so on. After about 10 lines added by different people, the students received the stories they started so they could wrote a conclusion and title for them. Students had the board creative license to make changes as they saw fit. The results were amazing! See below.
We have been asking great questions and learning new vocabulary and related science concepts (tesseract, hypercube, spacetime, dimension, black hole, wormhole, spaghettification, grandfather paradox, cosmology, speed of light, etc.). We have also watched some videos by physicists, including Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, and Neil DeGrass Tyson.
An inquiry question we’ve explored in our fiction writing unit is “What makes an excellent opening line?” I presented students with over 30 opening lines of famous novels widely acknowledged for having strong first lines. I asked students to analyze and discuss the merits of these exemplars and then to us them as inspirational frameworks for creating their own compelling opening lines.
After this practice, I invited students to submit as many entries as they would like to our own “GREAT FIRST LINE CONTEST”. The entries were wonderfully diverse and intriguing, as you can see below…
Each student cast votes for their top 5 favourite lines and the “People’s Choice” winners were tallied and announced as below…
In Art and ADST class, students have been designing fun model time machines and working to improve their drawing skills by practicing creating unique natural textures using just pencil, eraser and a smudger (Q-Tip.)
In math, we are continuing to explore our unit on fractions, decimals, and money. We had a formative assessment on Monday—it was great to see such excellent growth in understanding in just 2 weeks! Thank you to students who continue to take home their math duotang regularly for review at home. I hope those flash cards I sent home with you have been not only helpful, but also maybe even a bit fun! We have been doing lots of whole class and small group review, and emphasizing strategies for solving word problems. Remember to slow down to really READ what each question is asking, UNDERLINE key words/numbers, make note of what UNIT is being used, and WRITE YOUR ANSWER AS A COMPLETE SENTENCE including any units of measurement or dollar signs needed, etc.
COMING SOON: We will be creating our own graphic novels!
Inquiry Ninja 