What is a SYSTEM? March 30th Update

Good evening!

Reminders/Homework:

  • Unit Work to prepare for tomorrow’s activities:  15 minutes collecting lists of items in rooms of your house and recording what resources you think are in them
  • Narrative: 15-30 minutes; final draft due end of day Friday, more time to work on this tomorrow and Friday.
  • Notice: Genetics Lab April 22nd. Please pay by April 11th online or via cheque.

Today, before our Literature Circle meeting, we had a great discussion about the roles and responsibilities for group leaders and group members. This includes active listening, being prepared with your assignments before the meeting, making meaningful contributions to discussions, and being open-minded and respectful of others’ points of view. What does active listening look like? How does it help us have a better discussion?

We continued our work on needs and wants by completing a group activity sorting the 10 things we would take with us on a journey to another planet. The items we had to choose from were inspired by the United Nations Rights of a Child document. This was followed by discussion about how satisfying everyone’s needs and wants is a complicated task. Students observed that during this task, many of them had differing opinions about what is a necessary item for survival. We talked about how this is true of the world, as well.

Later, we talked about systems. What is a system? What systems do we know of in the world? What are the parts of a system? We discussed the universal systems model that includes the parts of Input, Output, Process, and Feedback, and then we applied the model to the school, as a system.

We are also going to talk about resources, and so students need to look for resources at home in the rooms of their house. Choose four rooms, record products, and then guess what kinds of resources were used to make those products. Tomorrow, we will analyze the data and see what conclusions we can make about resources used around us.

Finally, we had a game of football, courtesy of Peter and Michael, for PE class. Who is doing the next PE lesson for Monday’s gym class?

Have a great night!

Ms. D