Grade 7 are Spoken Poets and Activists!

The current unit in 7th grade Integrated Arts is "Activism in the Arts". We're looking at some of the visual art, music and performance art that has come out of activist movements around the world. All students created a spoken word poem about a cause of their choosing. Spoken Word Poetry has become a popular performance art among young people especially as they share their voices to help change the world and show their own power for good.

Here are some examples of the spoken word poems that Grade 7 students have been producing.

Zara:

Ver no Vocaroo >>

Kate:

 

Francesca:

Raisa:

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Powerful Poetry by Grade 9 Students

 

Grade 9 students have written, performed and produced videos for a variety of powerful, and personal, poems. These poems have been curated on the AISM Grade 9 Poetry Slam website. 

Click on the titles across the top of the webpage in order to access the pages for each individual poem, and don't forget to click "More" and scroll down the right-hand side of the webpage... there's more amazing poems there too!

4L Have Strong Opinions About Our Planet

How do you address your audience in a persuasive way? 

Grade 4L spent the last 8 weeks diving into deep issues around the world in our Sharing the Planet unit:

Central Idea: Interactions within environments have consequences

Lines of Inquiry:

• The cause and effect relationships within the environment
• How interactions impact environmental balance and sustainability
• How advancement in technology changes and affects the world around us.

Changing people's thinking about how we treat the planet was 4L's purpose behind learning how to write a strong and persuasive opinion text. 

We learned how to persuade readers by using a strong and bold thesis, reasons to support that thesis, and finally, examples to help us elaborate about our reasons. 

Please take a few minutes to read our published pieces and learn how you can share our planet responsibly.

We Need to Stop Poaching by Maelle

Stop Water Pollution by Mufaro

We Need to Stop Poaching by Elliana

Is Air Pollution a Problem? by Monica

We Need to Use Less Plastic by Hannah (coming soon!)

Deforestation Needs to Stop by Maia

We Need to Stop Deforestation Now!! by Makai

Climate Change by Tomas

Feel free to leave a comment on this post and share your opinions about sharing the planet too.

Photo by Richard Gatley on Unsplash

My Happy Place - A Poem by Joy Winter

 

Photo by Joy Winter

Kindergarten's Urban Safaris!

 

During their Sharing the Planet unit of inquiry, Kindergarten students are learning about the living things that share our environment:

Central Idea: When we look closely and wonder, we learn appreciation and respect for living things in our environment.

Lines of Inquiry:

• The features and behaviours of living things
• How features and behaviour connects to where they live (habitats)
• Respect and appreciation for living things

While the AISM campus was closed, they were challenged to go on an "urban safari" around their homes to see what living things they could find. Then, they were asked to document what they saw and record their ideas and thoughts about the features and behaviours of living things in their environments.

Here are two of those urban safaris!

Many thanks to Arielle, Pedro and their families for sharing these wonderful explorations and documentation with us.

Photo by: Rikki Chan on Unsplash

Our Virtual Library - Getting Real Books in the Hands of Students!

We are pretty proud of our AISM Virtual Library!

Getting real books into the hands of our students was a real priority at the start of this year, and the Library Team came up with a plan that would allow families to:

• go to the Virtual Library through our Virtual AISM site
• check the Library Catalogue
• complete a form in order to check books out
• request that they be left at the front gate of the school for collection
• come and collect the books
• read them!
• bring them back to the front gate
• have them checked back in to the system
• do it all again!

When books are returned, they are quarantined before becoming available for check-out again.

So far, there's been over 120 individual requests and roughly 350 books checked-out, read at home and then returned. The families whose names appear the most in the check-out forms are the Quelhas, Wei, Abraham, Ayala and Campos families - well done!

Please continue to make the most of this service in the next few months - it gives our Library Team great satisfaction to see books going out of, and coming back into, our Library.

Collaborative Assessment Design in the MYP

Designing assessment methods that are varied and fit-for-purpose for the curriculum, learning outcomes and objectives is a challenging and intellectually stimulating part of being an IB teacher!

In the Middle Years Programme (MYP), teachers plan and design assessments that are formed around conceptual learning and that are based on the criteria in each subject area. Collaborating with each other in order to do this work inevitably improves our capacity to design effective assessments, and typically that collaboration would happen in meetings with groups of teachers sitting around tables. That's just not possible at the moment... and teachers all over the world are really missing those opportunities. However, platforms like Google Docs help us to continue to collaborate in ways that transcend time and location!

In this example (click here to open the document), Francois Mccurdy created a Mathematics assessment task and then shared it with some colleagues in order to get feedback from them. By commenting on the document, and highlighting particular parts of it, Francois' colleagues asked questions and pointed out things that could be improved or re-thought. 

In the dialogue that evolved in the comments, you can see clearly how Francois was able to take feedback and use it to improve the task.