Hi Grade 8’s,

I am really looking forward to our continuing our learning and great conversations together online! We did begin our history unit focusing on Canadian Confederation and we will resume it next week.

For the next week, I would like us to turn back to our geography unit where we learned all about megacities and population settlement patterns. You each researched a different megacity around the world and created an excellent photo collage showing the factors that led to the city’s growth, the challenges the city faces with having such a large population, and then solutions (current or aspirational) that address each challenge.

For today’s independent work period, I would like you to research your megacity again, but through a different lens. With COVID-19, megacities are the areas in particular that will face the largest challenges with having such a high population (megacity=over 10 million). Your lens today is to learn about how COVID-19 is currently affecting the megacity you researched and how the city is mitigating the effects.

New vocab word of the day is ‘mitigating’- this means lessening the impact. A great Canadian example of this is our fun snowstorms. The snow storms are still going to happen (we can’t control this), but we can mitigate the impact by ensuring we have snow tires on vehicles to reduce car accidents, having equipment to shovel snow around the house, etc.

I am available during this time and will check in on how you’re doing. I will also help each of you find reliable sources, which is so important given the issue you’ll be looking into. Here is a breakdown of how to spend your time:

1. Research your megacity and how they are helping mitigate the effects of COVID-19 (Suggested time: 40 min). By the end of your research, you should have a total of 3 ways the city is helping lessen the impact of COVID-19.
2. Go back to your Megacity Google Slides presentation, and add 3 new photos to your collage (1 photo for each way) (Suggested time: 10 min)
3. For our first Google Meet class next Tuesday, you’ll be asked to share about why you chose each photo and describe it. Prepare what you would like to say about each photo (Suggested time: 20 min).

“See” you soon and email/Google Hangout chat with me if you have questions this morning!

Mrs. B

Hi Everyone,

Introduction to Social Studies- Virtual Style! 

I hope you had a great weekend and are all ready for our virtual classroom experience! It’s going to be a learning curve for everyone (including myself!) for where to find information, login information, getting used to the new schedule, but we got this 🙂 It’s an exciting journey together and one that I’m really looking forward to. It’s a great opportunity for you to dive into particular topics you’re curious or passionate about that relate to Social Studies (more to come on this, but be excited).

All your teachers are available throughout the day if you have questions. You have Mrs. Cleveland as your homeroom each morning and this is a great space to ask questions (I am sure others have the same questions as you too) and you have your Grade 6 Advisor too. Reach out to us and we’re here to help you throughout this journey.

Today we have our first ‘independent work’ period for Social Studies. This is a period where the class topic and tasks are given, and then you can work through the material on your own. What should you expect? It may be an article to read, video to watch, or activity to try out at home. This could be followed up by a task to complete and submit. An example of a task that could be assigned is a photo scavenger hunt, reflection to complete via Flipgrid, or questions to answer and submit through Google Docs. Whatever it is, it’s always my goal to have the instructions as clear as possible for your independent work period.

Today’s Plan- Wednesday, March 18th

We’re picking up where we left off at school. We have started our new unit ‘Canada’s Interactions with the Global Community’ …or lack of right now 🙂 You each created fantastic inquiry questions about things your curious to learn more about through the unit, and I’ll incorporate them along the way. One of the first tasks we started on was learning our world geography, so when we’re talking about different countries and places, you have an image of the world map in your mind and know where they are. So far we have learned and labelled North America, Central America, and South America.

TASK 1 (Suggested time: 20 minutes)

For the first part of our Social Studies class today (20 minutes), you are asked to continue to learn the country names for our next two continents (Europe and Asia). Visit the website Seterra and click the ‘play online’. If you have a printer, you can also click ‘printables’ to print out the maps like we did in class and try labelling it with an online Atlas (I’ll find a good online Atlas to use and add it to our ‘resource’ section of this blog at the top of this page.

TASK 2 (Suggested time: 55 minutes)

At the beginning of the year we learned about what it means to be an informed citizen and why this is important. The ‘big idea’ that we took away from it is that it’s important for us to use reliable sources and know what is going on in the world (current events) since we are so connected with one another. Start to think about what makes a source reliable or unreliable? What are the ‘clues’ on each website you go to that shows whether it is reliable or not?

For today, you are asked to find a ‘current event’ news article (Google News, CBC News, Scholastic News, Time for Kids). Here’s the CATCH: It needs to be a POSITIVE news article that is happening WITHIN Canada. We know that news tends to be negative so let’s all find some positive news to share with one another.

STEP 1: Find and read an article from an above source.

STEP 2: In a Google Doc., complete the following:

a. What is happening in the article?

b. Who is involved?

c. Where is it taking place in Canada?

d. Why should Canadians care about the issue presented and be informed about it?

Share your Google Doc. with Mrs. B by Friday at 9:00am. Be ready to share your current event at our first virtual class on Friday!

Looking forward to ‘seeing’ everyone!

Hi Everyone,

Welcome back! I hope you had a restful and healthy Winter Break with friends and family.

In Grade 7 we are continuing to learn about climate change. Today we had a discussion about the natural AND human causes that contribute to climate change and two important vocabulary words were introduced: mitigation and adaptation. We learned that while mitigation focuses on lessening a consequence, adaptation focuses on making a change that will impact and help deal with the problem.

Tonight there is some brief homework. My apologies that this is posted so late (it ended up as a saved draft). I’ll give students some time at the beginning of tomorrow’s class to complete the question, if needed.

Question: In 1 or 2 sentences, explain the differences between mitigation and adaptation. Then, explain 1 way that Canada is helping mitigate climate change, and 1 climate change adaptation for Canada.

To help with the first part of the homework, you can use Merriam Webster to look at the definitions of each word and then contrast the two. There is also this NASA article that you can refer to.

Looking forward to hearing your answers and our continued discussion tomorrow!

Have a good night,

Mrs.B

Grade 7 is learning all about climate in our English Social Studies class. We learned that climate is the prevailing weather patterns of an area in general or over a long period of time, while weather is more short-term and explains the conditions at a particular time.

We have learned that that the global climate patterns are changing, and this has resulted in more extreme weather patterns, such as an increase in natural disasters. This has directly impacted many communities around our planet that are prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. We each prepared a natural disaster report on a specific region and disaster event. Within the report, students summarized the disaster, discussed the short and long term impacts, and also how the community can better prepare for a future disaster and mitigate the impacts. After finishing our reports, we conferenced with one another and shared what we learned.

#Welearnbettertogether!

Next up, we learned how to create and read climate graphs. We had a fun ‘mystery city’ climate graph assignment, where we had to graph mystery ‘City A’, ‘City B’, and ‘City C’ based on their climate data. We had to guess which capital city in Canada belonged to each climate graph- we’re not going to give you the answers that easy though!

Take a look at an example of each mystery city below and then leave a comment with your guesses!

CITY A- Which Canadian Captial Could It Be?

CITY B

CITY C