WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON LATELY IN UE? (by Molly and Rhys) As you probably might know we all contributed doing what we call Expert Day. We each chose something that we are passionate about and already know, or something that we would like to become an expert at. Another fun thing that we did this January was we had a ski day at Brimacombe. We had lots of fun and learned lots of new skills. We got to hang out with our friends. The most fun part of it all was skiing of course!
In classroom learning, one of the things that the grade sixes have been studying this term is World Religions. Each person picked a certain religion (for example mine was Islam). We each studied it and became a master in our certain religion. Something that the grade fives have been studying is the Middle Ages. The large group of them each had a question about this time period, like “What did they eat?” or “What type of government did they have?” or “What were their houses like?”. They found sources and researched their question, and then included it in a giant slideshow of Middle Ages. Rumour has it we will be learning how to make chainmail, as soon as the materials for that arrive! The grade fours have been learning about matter, states of matter, atoms, and the periodic table. Something that we are all still working on and will continue to work on is our ICE RINK! We started this about two weeks ago and have been working on it ever since. We started by shovelling out all the snow in a certain area then we would get the hose and start to slowly spray the certain area the we shovelled. As I already said the ice rink is still in progress it is coming along nicely.
WHAT’S COMING UP? Well, another ski day will happen in February, so watch out for that. Also, this coming week we will have the folks from TRACKS (Trent Aboriginal Cultural Knowledge and Science) out to join us and share some learning on Thursday! We’re pretty sure that will involve being outside a lot, so dress for success outside, that day! Might even be an idea to bring extra stuff, if it gets wet. Also, our holidays committee has another fantastic potluck for Valentine’s Day on their agenda, because we love celebrating with food, here in UE! More info to follow on that, when the committee has made some decisions. People are really interested in making committees and groups right now. We have some people interested in baking things, especially after expert day, when there was BREAD! Also, we have a Dungeons and Dragons group who stay in one lunch and enjoy doing some role playing and adventuring. We learned in a recent leadership session with our principal, Emily, that we have a shortage of ‘Drivers’ and ‘Relationship Minders’ in our class, though we have lots of creative and spontaneous ideas people. All this committee work lets us practice more organizing and planning and MAKING THINGS HAPPEN, which is a bit of our weak spot at the moment. But, practice makes… better! We really enjoyed reflecting on our group work skills and roles in our Engineering Challenge – ask about the spaghetti and marshmallow 😉