As advertised on your Homework Sheet™, the link to the Quirks and Quarks podcast can be found be clicking here.

1.  Before you begin, prepare the space around you:

• remove all external distractions (phone, toys, little sisters, etc.)
• close all open tabs on your computer except this one
• remind yourself that Discord will still exist when you are done: you don’t need to check it every five seconds
• let your family know you are engaging in an activity that requires focus

2.  Then prepare your materials:

• get out your paper and sharpen your pencil
• clear off your workspace
• prepare the paper with your containers:

Big Idea (big text and big container): Scientific Advancements

Sub-Topics (medium-sized text and medium-sized containers):

• Climate Change
• Human Evolution
• Expansion of Universe
• Space Exploration
• HIV/AIDS
• Questions

3.  Draw lines to connect your Sub-Topics to your Big Idea (you can choose to connect the Questions container to the Big Idea, or have it on its own in a corner of the page).

4.  Prepare your inner world: take a purposeful moment to become calm, friendly, and still in your inner world, so that you can receive information.

5.  Read these instructions all the way through to the end.

6.  Take another purposeful moment to become calm and friendly.

7.  Press play.

A reminder that the first few minutes of the podcast is an introduction–please do listen to it, but no need to take notes.  Listen for when they start to discuss the first Sub-Topic, Climate Change.

Be an active note taker.  Use the Pause and Rewind (back 15 seconds) buttons liberally (a lot).

No full sentences–try to use as few words as possible for each Detail; abbreviations, symbols, and pictures can help with this.

You don’t have to write down everything – listen for the key information.

Use “chains” to break down long ideas.

Cluster the Important Details around the Sub-Topic they relate to; connect them to the Sub-Topic with lines.

There will be some complex information in here that you may not understand–what can you get a rough sense of by context (the words and ideas that surround the tricky idea), and when do you need to press Pause and look something up in order to understand and move on?

Write down questions that occur to you around the Questions container and connect them to the container with lines.  Questions can be things you don’t understand, things you want to know more about, or questions about how this information impacts other knowledge and ideas.

8.  When you have completed the web: this is when the real work happens: take time to look at the web as a whole, and begin to make connections from detail to detail across the web.  What patterns are revealed?

As we have done in class with our Listening web, these can be concrete connections (“It says ‘inner voice’ here and it says ‘inner voice’ there”) or connections that required critical and/or creative thinking skills.

You can use color to show these different types of connections, or you can use different kinds of lines.

Give yourself plenty of time for this final step.

9.  Reread the criteria and consider your work.  Have you missed any key aspects of the criteria.

10.  Do something nice for yourself.

Criteria:

• Hierarchy of Size: Big Ideas are BIG, Sub-Topics are Medium, Details are small
• Organization: details are clustered around the Sub-Topic they are related to
• Use of Fewest Number of Words to Capture the Idea, and Use of Your Own Words: no full sentences, break down long ideas into a chain of related details, if needed; if it is a quote, put it in quotation marks
• Connections: lines showing concrete connections across the web; and lines showing deeper connections across the web
• Attempt at Thoroughness: do not write down everything they say; do write down enough so that you could use the web to recall the information and explain it to someone else

Good luck!