Hello there. This is a huge post, so go make a cup of tea, come back and settle in. Here's what your wonderful kids have been busy with in school lately...
As part of Media Literacy, we're looking at the history of communication: from cave art to twitter. So far, we've looked at pictographs in French caves and petroglyphs found in Canada. More on that to come.
Not everyone has completed their cave art, so this wall display is still a work in progress.
The walls outside our classroom proudly display the work of your children.
There was a written component where students speculated about the materials used in cave art and how cave art was a form of communication. Are facebook icons all that different? It will be interesting to see the links students make when we get to the current state of communications.
Below: pictures of students journaling while listening to an audio recording of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 1 A Bad Beginning.
Above: Mr. Poe has a nasty cough. Awesome new words are popping off the pages of Mr. Snicket's book.
The Beaudalaire children, no doubt on their way to some miserable moment.
Above and below are pictures from the Greek prefix stations students rotated through last week in order to learn about etymology and pick up some new words in the process.
Students read definitions of words that all had the same prefix and speculated about the meaning of the prefix. Their answers were very interesting.
Below: Students share their graphs of classroom food wastage in a math congress. More on that below...
Mid-week, students learned about rock carvings called petroglyphs. Ontario is a rich source for petroglyphs if you are a Rock Head. There's even a park called Petroglyph Park near Peterborough, ON.
Lastly, here's the article in the Toronto Star that sparked our investigation into how much food we waste at home and school. You saw some of the graphs above.
Thank you for allowing your child to share this information with the class. We had a very rich discussion. Most children in our class weren't aware that the food collected during our food drive actually goes to hungry people in the GTA. They now know about food banks and have a heightened understanding about why we need to value the food we have.
Since I took these photos, I've added the student's post-activity reflections about food wastage and the pros and cons of collecting data. Big ideas from little kids.
That's it for now. See you soon.Erin Hawkins
