A writing workshop about a baboon?!?!?

What happens when we do a writing workshop on a baboon?!?!

As part of grade 6 language arts, students are required to research and report on a specific topic. So, as part of our science unit on flight, the students have all been assigned a famous person pertaining to flight to research and write their biography (biographies are a grade 5 outcome).

Our writing workshops the next couple of weeks concentrate on various skills needed to research, compiling a bibliography, and writing a well-written and interesting biography.

We've looked at the book Barack  as an example text.

Now students are looking at researching information about one of our bookshelf friends, Cheeks.

"Cheeks."  Baboon.
Isn't he cute?

The writing process was furious. There were so many questions to answer and they had to be based in fact with some creativity thrown in.

to read the final copy, come check it out on the wall at the front of our classroom, or email for the pics!

Exploring 2D Geometry 2013

We've spent the past 2 weeks looking at 2D shapes and their properties and all the cool things we can learn from them such as angles, area, perimeter, etc.

It's been a fun exploration! We've learned so much!

Some of our learning has taken us off on tangents.
For instance, what is that thing used for, anyway?

Do you know what this is?!?

I could have easily told them the answer, but instead two students took it upon themselves to research this thingamajig and find out how to use it and apply it to what we were doing in class!

Jacob, the researcher

Jacob & Innis went on the search & then taught the class all about it & how to use it!

In other areas of the class we were busy trying to construct triangles with specific angles, trying to prove our statements about triangles:

(Can a triangle with one 60 degree angle only have 60 degree angles?!!? Or can a right angle triangle have a 60 degree angle as one of its angles?!?!)

 We learned so much through hands-on, self-directed exploration that it was a unit we're feeling really good about!

Here are some links to pages we used to further our learning, too!
http://www.mathsisfun.com/triangle.html

http://www.coolmath.com/reference/triangles-types.html

Parallelograms



We also noticed the importance of triangles in engineering and building.




Anyone recognize this?