Saturday, September 15, 2012

Classroom Supplies Needed for September 2012

Each student will need to keep, in their desk, available at all times:

1. 'ear buds' or a similar  headset for viewing / listening laptop activities



2.  square sticky-notes (aka Post-It notes)

3. inexpensive coloured felt pens
Some students wanted to know why felt pens were NOT included on their class list of supplies? The pens available from our supplier were really costly compared to the prices you might find at any drugstore or department store. I didn't think that was fair!



Welcome!

This is the official blog of the Grade 6 class for the school year 2012-2013. Here you will find wonderful examples of student work such as


  • Glogs (from edu.glogster)
  • links to student blogs
  • word clouds (this year we will use Tagxedo--last year we used Wordle)
  • slide presentations
  • movie presentations
  • online books

Grade 6 at our school is a technology-rich year and the workload CAN BE intense: at the same time it is intensely useful, since students are building on skills needed in today's world.

We call these the 4 Cs. Communication, Collaboration, Creating Ideas and Critical Thinking. 

One authentic way to communicate is to publish our work to a worldwide audience. When real people give us feedback about our ideas, we are engaging in deep thinking and collaborating with our student peers from any culture. 

In Grade 6 we will try to solve a number of problems with a strategy called Project-Based Learning. There's a big difference between completing a "project" and solving a real world problem with our classmates. Along the way our collaborative and critical-thinking abilities will be stretched. The solution to a project-based learning problem always involves personal participation with hands-on solutions. It's always collaborative but in the end, a real world problem has been solved by our student teams. Here's a clue to our very first project-based learning task. Its title is "How Can You Improve the Classroom Environment?" For this task, groups of students will consider the affordability of implementing changes to the classroom structure and environment. They will actually make those changes!

If you are a parent, I urge you to familiarize yourself with your child's log in information for gmail, edmodo, and edu.glogster. I am sure that your child will be VERY proud to share with you, on an ongoing basis, the evidence of his or her learning this year.

Welcome to the exciting technology world of Grade 6 @ SFA.