In September students learned how to write numbers in binary (a base-2 number system). Today students learned that letters can also be coded in binary! Each student mapped out their names on grid paper, chose their colours, and beaded their names into a bracelet.
Here is a message for you, Division 3. Let’s see if you can decode it!
1001000 1000001 1010000 1010000 1011001 1001000 1000001 1001100 1001100 1001111 1010111 1000101 1000101 1001110
Students in Division 3 worked in teams to do a building challenge where they were tasked with building the tallest tower possible in ten minutes. Each group received an envelope containing toothpicks, string, tape, spaghetti, and mini-marshmallows to build with. This is a common ADST challenge that many of the students have done before… but what they didn’t know was that each envelope had different amounts of supplies. Some had lots of marshmallows but very little spaghetti, some had lots of spaghetti but few marshmallows, and so forth.
They had different amounts of supplies because this was actually a Social Studies exploration where students would examine the how the distribution of the world’s wealth and resources are inequitable. In this task students:
How should a classroom space feel?
What kinds of things can make it a productive space? A caring space? A safe space?
How can we all contribute to building community in our classroom?
What are your roles as a student? What are the teacher’s roles?
These are all questions we have started exploring as we reflect on our class agreements.
At the very start of the year, we brainstormed various roles and responsibilities expected from students and teachers. Several themes emerged from this discussion, and these themes are our Class Agreements. The agreements are:
These agreements don’t happen automatically–they take work and collaboration on the part of each individual student and teacher. Because these themes can be quite broad, students worked in small groups to create Y-charts to describe what each of these agreements would “Look like,” “Sound like,” and “Feel like.” After the first round, we reflected on what each agreement meant, and what each group wrote–we discussed how we could be more specific with our descriptions. Then groups worked on adding ideas to two more Y-charts.
A couple of things I noticed during this group work:
Monday was our first Roots2Grow session with Pablo in our school garden. Our focus for this session was “Care for Self, Care for Others, and Care for the Land.”
First we looked at the Medicine Wheel, which symbolizes life in a continuous natural cycle. The Medicine Wheel represents the four directions, the four seasons, the four elements, and all of humanity. People are part of the Earth, just as are the plants, animals, air, water, and rocks around us. It is important that we establish healthy relationships with all of these parts.
Gardening is a living process that responds to the natural cycle. The school garden is a small ecosystem that will succeed if we watch and take cues from the natural world. We do not need to be “perfect” gardeners (who is “perfect” anyway?!), but we can grow as gardeners simply by learning from what we are doing and what we have done in the past.
Our world is currently in a state of environmental crisis caused by past human actions. We must learn to care for ourselves, care for others, and care for our land in order to develop practices and take action to conserve and restore our natural resources.
Pablo reviewed the expectations for the garden, and then we got to work harvesting quite a few different types of vegetables!
We collected:
Which veggie was your favourite?
Did you do anything with it (like add it to some cooking or put in a smoothie)?
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