Welcome back, division 4 families!
I hope you enjoyed a restful holiday and are ready for 2023 to be an awesome year! Today we got a fresh start by cleaning our bins and school supplies. It’s so nice to be organized! (Please remember to bring back your school supplies if you didn’t get a chance to yet.)
Next, as a part of Career Education curriculum, we dove into an appropriate “new year” topic: goal-setting. I shared some examples of short term and long term goals and presented the SMART goal framework. In small groups, students brainstormed examples of goals they might like to set for this year. Then students prioritized and listed their top five goals for 2023.
Next, students watched a video (below) that I created to explain the importance of breaking large goals into smaller action steps.
Later we turned to discussion about our upcoming Salish Sea inquiry (S.S/Science/Art interdisciplinary learning) and the upcoming related field trip with Eagle Wing Tours on Tuesday, February 7th. We brainstormed our prior knowledge about the Salish Sea region and generated our questions about it.
After our afternoon library visit, I introduced the flight unit we will explore in Science this term. As students watched various Salish Sea documentary video clips, they had the challenge to design a Salish Sea-themed paper airplane. The goals of this activity were to (1.) transform and represent their learning about the Salish Sea in words and symbols on their plane, and (2.) create a basic paper airplane to act as a “control” in a series of upcoming test flights with new airplane designs. (A connection is that our novel study this term is “Hatchet”, which opens with a significant flight scene.)
There were many different and interesting plane designs and shapes. Students then brought the planes out for a few test flights. They were asked to observe the approximate duration, distance, path and style of the flight. Later this week we will learn specifics about the principles of aerodynamics and the science of flight and then create more paper airplanes informed by this learning. Then we will test the old versus new planes side by side to see how much we have learned.
Inquiry Ninja 