Weekly Update 29 Jan - 2 Feb

WRITING: We have spent time planning our narratives. We are using the story mountain as a scaffold. This week we decided on our characters, a problem that would happen in our story, and the resolution. We are enjoying being creative!

Unit of Inquiry: Children continued to bring in examples of family artifacts to share. They are learning to articulate the significance of personal artifacts and describe how they inform us about our lives.

The family relative interviews we looked at have been fascinating! Children have shared these and we have carefully reflected on how much has changed in daily life over the past 80 years.



Thank you to the families and relatives who have given us valuable insights into their own childhoods. We watched some videos of people who were famous when our relatives were young, and played some of their favorite traditional games.

This week we found out about our research task for this unit. We will conduct independent research on an artifact that interests us. We will need to present our work creatively for an audience...showing how our artifact has changed over time.

We met with the other grade 2 students to decide on our success criteria. It is important that we understand both the task, and how what success will look like in this unit. We were mixed into groups of 4, and had to organize 'I can' statements on a continuum of less important to more important. We then spent time justifying our ideas and debating what we believed was most important.

We did really well at quickly identifying the 'less important features.' Once all groups had agreed on their ideas...we tallied the results from the grade. Below shows an example of the document we worked on to try and combine the ideas we thought were important.

 

Learners finished off researching Angkor Wat. They used a scaffold to help them focus on the important unit questions. We have started to draft our ideas as a group for the wink junior page.

We were lucky enough to phone an expert about Angkor Wat. Ms Yin contacted her friend who works there as an Angkor Wat tour guide. learners generated questions, skyped him and recorded his responses to share back with the class. This helped us clarify some of our research.

At the end of the week, we decided on the artifact we wish to research for our summative assessment. We will need to be able to show how the artifact has changed over time, and how it has changed peoples lives. We wrote our ideas as questions for our Unit Wonderings board.



Technology: Mr Matt continued working with us on our coding games. Most of us now have moving parts....and can play a basic game. We still have a few minor modifications to make before our game is complete.