What a busy day!  We brought supplies to build pizzas and shared lunch together with our new learning community! Yum!

Today we started the new year with a bang – digging right into a mini-project for the week until we welcome our new classmates.

We spent the day today considering information about Vancouver crows through a documentary and some news sources. Crows are amazing creatures with complex lives and amazing abilities.

Students, if you’d like to share these with your family, you can find them here:

Nature of Things “A Murder of Crows”

Westcoast Reader “Thousands of Crows gather in Burnaby”

National Post “Infamous crow gets mail delivery cancelled to Vancouver street following attacks”

CTV news “‘Stalked and dive-bombed’ Increase in Vancouver crow attacks”

Here is the criteria for our mini-project:

Vancouver Crow Mini-Project

Complete a three day project to be presented Friday that is inspired by Vancouver crows

Criteria:

Complete an independent or partner fine arts representation (drama, written word, map, construction, video, poetry, song, etc) related to, or inspired by Vancouver crows

Your project must:

• Demonstrate knowledge about crows, their habitat and their behavior
• Must show your own thoughts, conclusions or beliefs about crows
• Must show context for the aspect of the crow’s life that you are highlighting
• Must be finished for presentation by Friday, September 8.

You will have all day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to learn and work on this project.

Ideas to inspire you:

• Research the daily migration or habitats of crows in BC and create a map that demonstrates movement
• Compare crow habitat to that of another local bird and create artwork from the patterns
• Find literary references or research the use of crows in culture and write about it
• Look at the impact of changing urban habitats
• Construct an anatomically correct or artistic 3D crow made from relevant materials
• Write a short story from any perspective about the life of a crow

Students, please remember your homework:

• look at the sky between 7-8 PM to see if you can find the crows heading to Still Creek
• find one fact to share with the class about crows on Thursday
• share the criteria with your parents and have them sign the paper

 

Hello, students formerly of Divisions 16, 17 and 18!

We are so delighted to be back at school with y’all, and are truly looking forward to our upcoming year.  We already have many good ideas that we can’t wait to share with you.  It was wonderful to see your beautiful faces today and to hear a little bit about what you’ve been up to.

Here we are, pleased as punch.

Jody, Tami, Karim (and Miranda, of course!)

We have been so busy with our Student Vote program we haven’t had time to post!

We’ll catch up after the election and we’ll see you all for Student-Led Conferences on May 18 where we will share our work.

For those of you who are looking to dig deeper into the differences between the parties, here are the links we worked with today in class.

http://studentvote.ca/bc2017/the-parties/

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/b-c-election-2017-20-hot-topics

http://globalnews.ca/news/3382441/bc-election-2017-a-look-at-promises-made-by-bc-liberals-bc-ndp-and-bc-green-parties/

https://votemate.org/

If you have other sites you’ve found helpful, please share them in the comments section!

We started Student Vote this term and we think that every kid should get an opportunity to learn about democracy, voting and the people that are doing things on our behalf.  We think Student Vote is important because it teaches kids about elections and how they work.  We learn about important issues like pipelines and rallies.  We also will learn about all of the candidates and what their platforms are.  In the past, we had candidates come in to talk to us about what their ideas were for fixing problems and we got to know a little bit about them.  Our past experiences have been amazing because we get to feel grown up and we get to do things our parents do.

When we are 18, we will know more than many other people because we will be more educated and informed because of this project.  Over years of learning about Student Vote, you get to know more about the candidates and the parties and what their beliefs are.

You can learn more about Student Vote at http://www.studentvote.ca

By Touchdown, A-JuiceInjuryABC123, Arcticfox, Smeagaleater10

In Student Vote, we learned about democracy.  We watched a video about democracy and played a few games.  The video was about different types of governments.  Some are good and some are sort of a betrayal of their own people.

We learned that even though the Queen of England is our queen too, she isn’t the person who makes the decisions, it’s the Prime Minister.

The game we played was called “Survivor Island”.  In the game we had to make groups and make decisions, like if there will be a leader or not and if there will be a list of rules.  This game showed us about decision-making and what you have to do to make a system that works.

We learned that the definition of democracy means respect, freedom and trust and everyone gets to speak.  This is mostly everything we’ve learned about Student Vote so far.

by Flying Giraffe, the engineer, Skoule, Grass, French Waffles