Grade 8: Creating Effective Surveys

Our grade 8 students are currently in the middle of large-scale study, combining both the Worldview and Renaissance components of the Social Studies curriculum. This study contains two sections, first the creation of a worldview survey, and then a study on the Renaissance, comparing the Italian City States to the conditions in contemporary Calgary.

To help with the first component, we've had few experts participate in the study, bringing the element of authenticity into the work. A few weeks ago our students Skyped with Wes Fryer, who informed us of some of the recent changes in networking technology, and how they are changing the way information is accessed and shared.

We had another guest speaker in a few weeks ago, Rob Pegg, who's one of the parents at our school and also a web designer. In his own line of work, Rob has often designed and implemented surveys, and so the teachers asked him to come speak, providing the students with a number of elements to consider when putting together an effective and unbiased survey.

After listening to Rob, the students discovered that making survey questions that pull out someone's worldview is very difficult. There are so many factors that influence someone's view of the world, and also the students found it challenging to make 'objective' survey questions that highlighted the key elements of someone's worldview, without being vague, general or leading.

After collaboratively writing the questions, we put the first version of the survey into Survey Monkey, and have since had our grade 9 students test the survey. Also, Survey Monkey has the feature of allowing comments on individual questions, so we asked two classes of grade 9s (who had just finished a math unit on surveys) to provide feedback on all the questions. The grade 9s were able apply the content they recently covered (on topics such as 'question bias', 'answer bias' and 'leading questions') to give focused feedback to the grade 8s on their questions.

The grade 8 are currently revising the questionnaire, and will be releasing it publicly in the new year - hoping to receive as many responses as they can from around the globe.

Grade 7: Remixing Historical Perspective

One of our grade 7 Humanities teachers, Dan McWilliam, just finished a project with his grade 7 students. In order to understand the concept of perspective in historical accounts, Dan had his students re-write a 'picture book' on colonialization from an alternate perspective.

Dan used the book "The Rabbits," written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan. "The Rabbits" is an incredible visual story of a group of rabbits (the colonizers) who arrive in a new land, spreading their worldview over the native marsupials who reside there. The art work is stunning, and weaves in fantastic imagery of western philosophy and expansionism.

The original book,"The Rabbits" is told from the point of view of the native marsupials, and so Dan wanted his students to explore the motivations of the colonizing rabbits, so he had his students retell the story from their alternate perspective.

Working in pairs, the students were each assignment one page out of the original book. Students then had to imagine how the events on the particular page might be retold from the perspective of the colonizers, rather than the 'natives.' Dan scanned pages from the original book, and the students remixed pieces with other images they found. The students used Abode Firework to create the new pages, and then Dan assembled the pages, and had one book published from each of his two classes.

Through the re-telling of the story, both from the rabbits' perspective, as well as through the lens of Canadian History, the students included historical details relating to the fur trade, the signing of land treaties and residential schools. The students creatively used historical images from events in Canadian history, and using Fireworks, replaced the heads of the characters with the heads of rabbits and marsupials. In doing so, the students were able to weave in historical understanding and demonstrate an ability to retell historical events from alternative perspectives.

Here's a digital slideshow showing one of the two classes retold storybook:

Grade 4 Resources: Light and Shadow

One of our Grade 4 Math Science Teachers, Louis Cheng, has been building a website to house and share the Science resources he develops for class. He has recently made this site public for other elementary science teachers to utilize. You can access the site by clicking here.

The site contains a ton of activities, handouts and examples to use in class, as well as background information on a number of the outcomes within the "Light and Shadow" unit for grade 4 Science.

Louis has spent a lot of time and energy gathering these resources and developing the site - and we encourage interested teachers to use and share the materials that Louis has collected.

Peace Festival

Every year at this time, our school community comes together around an event called Peace Festival.

Peace Festival started many years ago as a way to celebrate the multicultural make-up of our student body. It was also a way to focus our entire school population (teachers, students and admin) around topics of human rights, global awareness and the difficult living conditions of many people around our city, country and the world.

Each year we bring in a number of guest speakers, from both local organizations to international development agencies. Guest speakers range from Homelessness in Calgary, to HIV/Aids Hospices to Child Soldiers. We also like to highlight some of our own staff who have chosen to volunteer, both locally and internationally, as we believe it's important to model making these types of decisions to our students.

Combined with the guest speakers, we also make teaching resources available on global issues. One package of lessons came from uEnd (http://www.uEnd.org), formally known as ChristmasFuture. Over the course of a week, teachers can sign out different guest speakers, and select different lessons to build stronger global awareness.

The culmination of Peace Festival is a two-day celebration over the last two days of school before Winter Break. Each class is provided with space in the gym to build a booth, or informative experience, based on a topic related to multiculturalism or Human Rights issues. During the last two days of school, all the students get time to visit the celebration, and we finish with a final Peace Festival Assembly, filled with student videos, blessings and prayer from a variety of Faith Communities, and singing.

This year, today was the first (unofficial) day of Peace Festival, as we had our first guest speaker in this morning. Donna Kennedy-Glans is the founder of Bridges, a 'volunteer based humanitarian organization.' Bridges works to support gender equality in middle Eastern countries, particularly Yemen. Donna had one of her own children at our school a few years ago, and as a result, she's spoken here a number of times. It was great kick off to this year's Peace Festival.

Following Donna in the afternoon were two other guest speaker. Amy Golumbia is the education manager for uEnd - a Calgary organization that has developed a database of proven, sustainable development projects. Amy spoke with four of our classes about the conditions she witnessed during a recent trip to Ghana, and how uEnd is working to redirect North American spending habits to development projects.

Finally, Chris Dittmann, one of our Grade 5 teachers also spoke with four classes about his recent trip to South Africa. Chris volunteered with "Hands at Work" - an organization that worked with HIV/AIDS patients. During Chris' presentation he shared stories from his travels, as well as sharing his insights into the relationship between poverty and HIV/AIDS.

Grade 6 Graphic Design

Some of our grade 6 students have recently finished a large scale writing project, called the Penny Book project. This project involves students writing a series of short stories, capturing memories from different years of their lives.

The students have just finished all the planning, writing, editing and polishing of the stories, and the next step is to get their writing ready for printing. To do this the students are going to be introduced to the basics of graphic design and page layouts. To get the students creating effective page layouts for their stories, we're using a two-step process.

First, Neil Stephenson, one of our staff will be introducing the Apple application 'Pages', the program the students will be using to design their page layouts. Neil will be teaching the students how to modify text, add and enhance photos, and move objects arounds, basically giving the students the basic technical skills needed. Below are the materials the students will use to create a practice page when learning the tools in Pages. We're going to build a sample page for the book "A Christmas Carol," by Charles Dickens.

Second, Jill Foran, editor of Kayak magazine is coming in to introduce our students to some of the basic design principles that editors use when doing page layouts. We're so lucky to have someone who does graphic design for a kids magazine to come in an work with our students. We're excited to see how learning the principles of design can help our students communicate more effectively, using the powerful tools they have on their laptops.

Grade 8's Skyping With Wes Fryer

Last week, our grade 8 students had the good fortune of having an hour and a half skype chat with Wes Fryer, an educational thinker and blogger from Oklahoma. Wes was very generous with his time - and we were very thankful for the opportunity to chat with him.

Our students are currently working on a project combining both the 'Worldview' and 'Renaissance' elements of the grade 8 curriculum. During our skype chat, Wes was able to assist our students' thinking about the changing role that technology plays in the spread of ideas. He also provided some suggestions about particular websites and 'marketing' techniques that our students should consider to help their survey find a wider audience.

Here's some of the highlights from Wes' chat with our students: