#HClass22 Blog “You look like when you get an idea, a lightbulb appears above your head” - October 31, 2022

  Classroom Quote of the week:

“You look like when you get an idea, a lightbulb appears above your head” said by Mohammed when he was having a “Roast Battle” with Muhab at lunch.

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Introduction ~

Hello and Welcome to our 5th Blog! We had back-to-back four day weeks because of Thankgiving and a PD day, so we took a mini-break, but we've returned. My name is Yara and it’s an honour you’re reading this. My favorite subjects are Music and Science. Now let’s go straight to the good stuff!

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The Rose ~

The rose this week was the Pumpkin Time Bombs we created. Let me explain. Some people brought in pumpkins and we put rubber bands around the middle of them until they exploded. One group needed 370 rubber bands to explode their pumpkin. Check out the gif below to see what happened with one group when their pumpkin took them by surprise. It was our rose, but it was also a math activity, more on that later.

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The Thorn ~

The thorn this week was that some of our outdoor gym periods were cancelled due to rain. It was a bit disappointing, but we did some Health work instead. More on that later too.

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The Bud ~

The bud for this week definitely has to be Halloween. Next week is Halloween and we are excited to go trick-or-treating and wear our costumes. Yashvi is planning to bring in cupcakes and we’re looking forward to that. Some students are even planning on wearing their costumes to class on Monday. Nothing too scary - we know that there are three-year-olds who attend our school.

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Mathematical Mentions ~

What kind of math can you do with pumpkins? Well, we collected data by determining the height and circumference of the pumpkins pre-explosion and then the diameter and rind thickness post-explosion. We put this into a data base and looked for relationships. Next week, we will explore the relationship between diameter and circumference.

We also started coding with a program called Scratch. The activity we’re working on uses characters and scenes from a Cartoon Network program called “The Amazing World of Gumball”.

Personally, it’s fun so far. It's a remake of the episode “The Signal'.' We are learning about storytelling with this coding project and that includes dialogue, foreshadowing and a story arc. We have to have at least two backgrounds and a main, secondary and tertiary character. The best part is making your main character glitch with a procedure. In code, a procedure is a series of instructions that you will use multiple times in your program. After you create the procedure, in this case a “glitch” that includes “loops”, you don’t need to retype the code again.

An example of a Procedure, to "glitch" a character in our
Scratch Coded story

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Literacy Learnings ~

In literacy we started writing an essay about our passions or reasons for living. It is based on a scene from a television dramedy in which a character talks about his “Big Gigantic Drum Kit” as his reason for living. You can watch the scene here. Imagine if you could pursue your passion at school? What would your school day look like?

We began with a strategy called "Thinking Stems" to organize our ideas. You can see an example from Anviksha below. Notice how we use it to organize our paragraphs.

Then, we started our first writing draft. Mr. Hodgkinson says we are ready for essay writing because he has a plan to reveal the “great writers” inside us all. Next week, we keep editing using the RADaR strategy.

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Health~

In Health, we started to look at the dangers of alcohol and the role that media plays in presenting the positive side of alcohol without showing the negatives. Here are three cool facts I learned:

1: Beer can be sold in kegs and teenagers buy kegs which can lead to binge drinking.

2: Vodka has 40% Alcohol by Volume which means, it is 40% alcohol and 60% water. So it is strong.

3: If someone passes out drunk, they should be turned on their side to avoid aspirating.

Thanks for reading…next week, Nathan will be writing.

#HClass22

All student pictures have been posted with permission