A Chinese story

This is a Chinese story which students can listen to in their spare time. The difficulty for international students to learn Chinese is that they don't have a "language environment". Think about how we learn our first language. We listen to our parents to speak it everyday and know how to speak even no one really teach us intentionally. That's what we called "language acquisition". For second even third language learning, the most efficient way is to immerse in the target language. One way to do this is to listen to all kinds of listening materials.

Hour of Code

This week the 6th grade students participated in the Hour of Code.  It is a worldwide movement to help promote computer programing. Programing helps develop problem-solving skills, logic and creativity.  Check out the video and link for more information.  

What is hour of code?  

Book Report Movie Trailer

Students were given an option to create a movie trailer to demonstrate knowledge from the book they had read. This student chose to use an iMovie template. She included several pieces of original film and original pictures in order to show some important information from the novel.

Mapping our Week Without Walls Experiences!

In our Grade 8 Humanities class, we used "Google My Maps" to reflect on our incredible Week Without Walls experiences. The students collaborated on maps to mark the various locations they traveled to - both local and abroad - and told stories about their adventures.

Please feel free to navigate the Google Map, click on the various icons, and read the stories our students wrote about their incredible WWW adventures!

Child Labour and Factory Conditions

Students in 8th Grade Humanities needed to create a documentary using iMovie to demonstrate their learning about child labour. Students were required to use information and articles from class and combine their knowledge with pictures, video, and dialogue to create a documentary. They needed to use the theme "With Great Power comes Great Responsibility" as their guide. Here as an example of what one group created. We spent 3 days creating these videos and then presented them to our class.

Reader's Escape: Book Trailer

Throughout their 7th grade careers, students are required to read 20 books from 10 different genres. One assignment was to create a book trailer to share one of their favourite books with their classmates.  The goal of the video was to share the basic plot and characters of the book, as well as persuade students to read the book their video illustrates.

Week Without Walls Video Review!

Enjoy the video of the 2015 Middle School Week Without Walls!

Each of the videos was put together by a teacher leader using iMovie.   

Week Without Walls at the Movies

During Week Without Walls we had the opportunity to help students make movies.  Students were responsible for adapting a children's story, writing the script, filming, acting, editing and producing the video.  All of the editing and producing was done using iMovie on their Macbook Pro computers.  Some groups utilized the green screen option as well.  Below are a few examples from the week.  Though these are not Oscar winning films, this is a great beginning for students to tell stories through film.  Please enjoy!

The Giving Tree (7th Grade Group)

Eat Your Peas (8th Grade Group) **Winner of Best Picture**

The Gruffalo (6th Grade Group)

Share Your Testimony

We have the awesome opportunity to work with students who are continually searching for and growing in their faith in Jesus Christ.  All 8th graders have the opportunity to present their faith at the end of the year in any way.  The example below is done by Austin Yasuda.  He chose to create a videogame from scratch based on his testimony.  Austin then did a screencast of himself playing the game, followed by recording a voice over.  This gives an incredible visual of Austin's faith in Jesus.  This project was done in class, using the 1:1 program to enhance his creativity and create a unique medium for him to share his faith.

The Messiah is Coming Project

For this project students investigated the prophecy written by Isaiah about the coming Messiah.  Students investigated scriptures and then from their research created a poster advertising the coming king.
Students used a tool called PosterMyWall to create their advertisement poster.

Below are some examples of excellent student work.

 

 

 

Meet the Gospel Writers

8th grade students have the opportunity to spend the entire year studying the ministry of Jesus.  Our first unit focuses on the authors of the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  For this project students worked individually to become experts on a single gospel writer.  After the students had found all of their information, they combined their information with the other students who also had researched that writer.  In the end the students created a presentation and taught the class about their author.
*As an added challenge, students were only allowed to have 6 words per slide.  Due to the limitations, a majority of details were shared through the presentation, not the slideshow.

 Below is an example of a Google Slideshow the students created

Designing Infographics with Piktochart

Piktochart is an online tool used for class projects across the middle school.  One of the first individual projects we do in 6th grade humanities is their introduction to the power of infographics and this amazing resource.  After setting up the project, going over the rubric and showing them the basics of Piktochart, students were given one block to research four categories about life in ancient Mesopotamia and create an infographic with an MLA formatted bibliography.  It was a lot to ask for in just one block, but the students were very focused and turned out some excellent results.

Multimedia Book Reports with Thinglink

For their first book report of the year, students were asked to create and share their reports through the online tool, Thinglink.  Thinglink allows users to make images interactive by adding text, other images, links and video to them.  Simply put your cursor over the image and then hover over any of the 'buttons' that appear to learn more information about this book.

The students did a great job and enjoyed combining their own ideas with other curated information!