T'was the Second Week Before Holidays

Another week in the books with only one more to go before the Winter break! This week the kiddos finished up their narrative scenes in writing and helped to co-create out next adventure in writing; the digital story! These kids have so many great ideas and are so keen to get working on this new writing assignment. We will most likely get the prewriting done this week and start to work in the drafting and storyboards when we come back from the break.

Brainstorming for Digital Stories

We worked on demonstrating an understanding of informational texts with a What in the World article entitled "Turkey versus the Syrian Kurds". This was a tricky reading with lots of discussion around the conflict in the Middle East. This article was accompanied by a few infographics that we dissected as a class. Showing an understanding of information in infographics is a section on the OSSLT (the  EQAO literacy test that students need to write in grade 10) and I want these kids to have as much practice with this skill as possible. 

One of the infographics we worked with this week.

To help prepare for the digital story assignment we have been looking at different tools that the kids can use. iMovie will be the main app that students will use during the editing phase of the project. I gave them and iMovie 101 checklist to see what they already know and we have som clear experts in both classes. They also learned how to use the apps Adobe Spark Vidoe and Animoto as other possible options. I love both of these tools as alternatives for communicating. To help the kids get more familiar with these apps they did a little mini-research into the superstitions behind Friday the 13th and communicated what they learned through the production of a piece of media of their choice

Friday the 13th Research

The students of 8D have also been working hard to prepare for the last week before the holidays. We have a dedicated team that has taken a lead on the door decorating competition.  Special thanks to Kate and Jordyn for preparing a slide deck with possible ideas for the class to vote on to get the ball rolling. 

Short and Sweet

It was a short week with no school for students on Wednesday and Friday and we also had a powerful assembly from the folks at Get Real on Tuesday that was sponsored by the MDHS GSA. Students shared their challenges in both life and school and also thought about all the things that they were grateful for. The assembly finished with sharing ideas about what we could do to make MDHS a better place. 
                                                             Link to Get Real website

We continued to work on reading like writers as students keep their eyes peeled for examples of literary devices and new vocabulary in their independent novels. We have also been playing different games to boost our understanding of similes, metaphors, hyperbole, personification, imagery, allusions, oxymorons and onomatopoeia just to name a few.

Both classes were putting the finishing touches on their narrative scene writing assignment.  We are working on the concept of showing instead of telling in narrative writing as well as mastering the inclusion of dialogue in stories. There are so many important dialogue punctuation and formatting rules to remember when writing stories and students demonstrated their understanding of this in this last assignment. We will be moving on to the co-creation of our last narrative writing assignment next week and this time we are getting digital!

We discussed the road map for digital storytelling so the kids have an idea of where we will be going. Those that finished their narrative scene writing began to explore and refresh their memories about iMovie, the powerful video editing tool that we will become experts in over the next few weeks.  Stay tuned for the next assignment and assessment tool!