#HClassBlog -- “Hey, they were in the play!” -- October 31, 2023

Quote of the Week:

 “Hey, they were in the play!” -- shouted by several students when seeing actors Emeka Agada and Leon Qin coming down the stairs at The Grand Theatre after seeing Kim’s Convenience.

Introduction:

For the fourth year, the Grade 7 class at Sir Arthur Currie in Portable 14, will be sharing their thoughts and stories in a weekly blog. This week, we created the blog collaboratively. Next week, Yara will be our first student blogger, with Umar and Callen already signed up for November 15 and 22.

The Rose:

When we write the blog, we start by reflecting on our Rose, Thorn and Bud for the previous week, (October 20 - 24).

The rose is the thing we loved and, last week, that had to be our field trip to see Kim’s Convenience at The Grand Theatre. To make it even better, Ms. Dolby and Ms. Shamirian (our teacher candidates from Western and Nippissing University) were able to join us.

The Thorn:

The thorn represents something we did not enjoy, or regret. Last week, bus #5 and #1 were late often.. However, that only affected a few of us. As a class, we did mess-up in Mdm. Pierce’s French class, making some poor listening decisions. Around here, mistakes are expected and respected. They are also inspected and corrected and we did that first thing Monday morning.

The Bud:

Next week, we are excited to learn about Pumpkin Time Bombs. We’ve brought in more than 10 pumpkins and will record how many elastic bands it takes to get them to explode. It will also be Halloween, so we are looking forward to costumes, trick or treating and...so...much...candy.

Literacy Leanings:

We’ve recently started reading Two Degrees by Alan Gratz. The story takes place in three locations with three different sets of characters. Each one involves a crisis related to our changing environment -- so we are connecting it to our studies in Science and Geography. 

For the story set in Sierra Nevada, we learned about the Giant Sequoia trees and we created research slides and Sequoia tree Shapegrams. They can be seen here and this is one of our class’ best examples.

However, most of our focus last month has been Kim’s Convenience. We talked about the immigrant experience in Canada and learned about how differences between generations of Canadians can sometimes lead to family conflict that has to be resolved. We got a chance to try some improvisation to create a “family” who had to deal with a conflict. 

For example: 

• “Who has been eating all the snacks?” 
• “What happens when the kids want a pet, and mom does not?”
• “What if a teenage daughter wants to get a motorcycle, and dad forbids it?”
  

Math Mentions:

Our focus in mathematics has been on the multiple rules, Lowest Common Multiples and Greatest Common Factors, as well as Prime Factorization, in order to solve real- life word problems. See the example below.

We also started doing some coding. We are creating three-act stories, featuring foreshadowing, that include characters from the Cartoon Network show “The Amazing World of Gumball”. We should be able to share some stories next week.

Science Sensations:

In Science, we saw a powerful video from Rapper/Spoken Word Artist Prince EA (born Richard Williams). It was called Man vs World or 3 Seconds.  Prince EA delivers a engaging  message about man’s impact on the world.

He starts by pointing out that the world has been here for 4.5 billion years and humankind has only been on it for about 140,000 years. In other words, if the world was a 24-hour clock, humankind has only been here for three seconds. We have accomplished so much in that time, but we are also changing our environment in ways that might not let us make it to the fourth second.

Thanks for reading. 

Yara will be back to share our adventures from October 30 - November 3.

#HClass23

All student photos used with permission.