We celebrated Pi Day a little early in Division 2 on March 12th and with half of the students than we normally have but a lot of fun was still had! Check out the photos below...
March 13th, 2020
Friday the 13th and we couldn't have had more fun than with this Goose Chase scavenger hunt! We had 3 teams that competed against each other to belt out Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe using classroom instruments, get a staff member to complete a Tik Tok Dance with them, film themselves making 3 baskets in a row, doing handstand pushups, and so much more!!
March 3rd, 2020
The class took a trip to the Surrey Art Gallery to view Coast Salish artist, Susan Point's work. We were drawn to the colours and the intricate designs of her work. We were wowed by the symmetry in her art and wondered how she got the drawings to be so precise! We couldn't believe when we learned that she drew all her pieces freehand. That's very impressive! Even her first print looked amazing.
In the afternoon, we headed back to the classroom to try our hands at using trigons, crescents, and circles to make our own prints that represent our sense of place. Check out some of our creations below! Keep an eye out in the hallways for our artwork and artist statements.
February 20th, 2020
We were lucky to be visited by Mr. Speak's class today! We got to choose what to make with them and we went back to our favourite recipe, brownies! We didn't get too many pictures because the afternoon was a little chaotic with 52 students baking 9 batches of brownies... but here are a few!
February 5th, 2020
Global Play Day is such an important day to celebrate for so many reasons! It's a good opportunity for the class to get to know their peers in a comfortable setting, learn to problem solve and cooperate through play, and most of all, be kids!
January 27th, 2020
Happy Fried Rice Friday! We made our own fried rice from scratch and then made our own recipe videos to go along with it (inspired by Tasty).
January 23rd, 2020
In keeping with our class goal of this year to build community, we collaborated with our peers to make animal masks out of Plaster of Paris. We spent one afternoon making the masks, a few classes designing and painting our masks with acrylic paint, and then paraded our final products around the school in the order of the Chinese Zodiac for Chinese New Year!
January 22nd, 2020
After another round of Nat Banting's Conjectures and Counterarguments, we created our own conjectures about adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing integers. It took a few revisions but so far, this is what we've agreed upon! To get to this point, we first formed our own conjectures about integer operations and two examples that proved our conjectures. Then, we opened it up to the class for them to find counterarguments and examples that refuted the original conjecture. When we could no longer find any counterarguments, we decided that these were the conjectures about integer operations "for now".
January 17th, 2020
What a great day at SFU with Scientists in Action! It's always a good time when we get to use an actually chemistry lab and learn from university students at a beautiful campus. Today, we learned about chemical reactions and got to take home a small keepsake (a test tube that had undergone the silver mirror effect). Check out all the photos of us in our lab coats!
January 10th, 2020
After completing CIVIX's Student Budget Consultation where we looked at the Canadian Federal Budget and thought about where their revenue comes from and expenses go, we looked at budgeting for our dream homes. In order to afford our dream homes, we looked at what kind of annual income our dream job would bring in. Then, we thought about where in British Columbia we'd ideally like to live. We used The Cost of Living BC Calculator to find out the information about our dream jobs and one of the first things that we noticed was that a dentist in Vancouver does not make the same as a dentist in Williams Lake or other rural areas. Then, we went on to the Real Estate MLS website to find our dream jobs based on where our jobs were located. After watching a news segment on the CBC, we learned that generally people are put down 20% of the cost of their home as a downpayment and it is best if your mortgage does not exceed three times the amount of your annual income. Wow. There were a lot of calculations and a lot of things we noticed about the housing market and affordability. Check it out below...
January 7th, 2020
To kick off another term of collaboration and cooperation, we participated in a Silent Shoe Stack at our random table groups. The challenge was to build the highest shoe tower without speaking to our group members. Since September, we have been assigned random seats every day. It was challenging at first not knowing where we were going to sit, organizing our supplies, and getting used to the constant change but since then, we have overcome the obstacles and are communicating with more people than we initially thought we would. We are making new friends and learning how everyone has a different communication style, strength, and weakness. Check out our photos from today's challenge!
January 6th, 2020
We are gearing up for our musical in February and the class is going to be learning the dance moves to Disney's High School Musical! If you want to get a head start, head on over here (at around 5:30) to learn the moves.
December 20th, 2019
Using Unit Chats , the students expressed how many numbers they spotted in the picture. We tried to find as many whole numbers, fractions, and percentages within the image projected. The first question the students were asked was, "How many?" and then with their response, other students were prompted to see if they could also spot the number depending on what "unit" they were counting. We spent about 10 minutes talking about this particular image and are sure that with more time given, we would have found many more numbers represented. The longer we looked at the picture and paused to notice more details, the more we found. We will be doing more of these as daily number routines throughout the year now that we have spent more time exploring ratios, decimals, and percentages.
December 19th, 2019
We finally got to meet our pen pals at Woodland Park in Mr. Speak's Grade 6/7 class. We dropped off our holiday cards, played a couple rounds of Gaga Ball, and then participated in a White Elephant Gift Exchange! Thanks for organizing everything, Mr. Speak! We cannot wait to write more letters and participate in more activities in 2020!
December 18th, 2019
Thanks to the Serpentine PAC we were able to decorate Gingerbread Houses to celebrate the end of the year!
December 17th, 2019
We held a volleyball fundraiser for grade seven students and teachers. All the proceeds are going towards our Grade 7 Camp and Year-end Activities! Thanks to everyone that contributed their time or money to this special cause! Both the girls and boys games were very well attended and... the students beat the staff both times!
November 18th, 2019
We are entering the CBC First Page challenge this month and kicked it off with a discussion about current event topics and how they might affect life in Canada in 2169 (150 years from now)! Check out what we created during our Story Workshop brainstorm. They ranged from Landon mentioned that Russia might take over the world to Angela and Kaedyn discussing overfishing becoming a problem to Johnson's idea of new iPhones where you do not have to carry around a phone and the screen just appears in front of you when someone calls.
November 4th-5th, 2019
We held our second annual Skype-a-thon! The students took turns rotating throughout roles of being the greeter, questioner, answerer, filterer, and sharer of facts (about Canada). Feel free to check out our Twitter feed using the hashtag, #serpentineskypes.
November 1st, 2019
We made mini apple tarts today with the leftover apples from the BC Fruit and Veggie program. We used pastry dough to create our own pastry toppings. Check out our creations!
October 31st, 2019
Pumpkin Day was a huge success this year! Thank-you to all the students and parents who donated pumpkins to make our day so successful!
We started the morning with an estimation extravaganza. We estimated how much our pumpkins weighed, how far we could roll our pumpkins, how many seeds were inside our pumpkin, and how many mini gummy pumpkins fit into a flask. For each of our estimations, we made our initial guesses (guesses that are just right) and then adjusted our guesses after more information was revealed (revised just right). Once we found our actual answer, we plotted all the numbers on a number line between what we thought was too low and too high initially. After recess, we all participated in a pumpkin time bomb. We put elastics around our pumpkins and recorded our observations about the pumpkin as the elastic bands were attached. Can you guess how many elastics it took to make the pumpkin explode? 150! Lastly, we worked in groups of 5 to create a pumpkin elevator out of a large cardboard box, PVC pipe, string, popsicle sticks, and duct tape.
It's safe to say that the whole day was a huge success filled with a focus on our communication and critical thinking skills.
October 30th, 2019
The class connected with another class in Arequipa, Peru and chatted about each other's traditions. We learned that they celebrate October 31st with a cultural festival filled with dance and music and is a completely different special occasion called El Día de la Canción Criolla.
October 29th, 2019
The class visited Guildford Seniors Village on October 29th to bring some Hallowe'en joy to the residents! They sang C'est L'halloween as well as O My Darling, Frankenstein. We practised in the class as well as in Music class with Ms. Reimer. The students got to test out their costumes and then make some final tweaks before our big reveal the following day when we walked to McDonalds.
October 22nd, 2019
Spent some time outdoors today with our buddies in Ms. Bassi's class. We went looking for shapes of all sizes.
October 18th, 2019
The Grade 7s in both classes ran the polling stations for the Student Vote this year. They informed themselves about what the history of voting in Canada and the difference between the right to vote and responsibility to vote as well as each of the party's platforms. One of the key issues that we discussed heavily this election was the current climate crisis. As seen with our glyphs below, it looks like the climate crisis is a concern on most of the young voters' minds.
October 11th, 2019
Thank you, Translink for Free Transit Week!! We took advantage of the free public transit and bussed from our school to Dell Lanes Bowling. Packing 52 students and 6 adults on to one public bus was a little challenging but we managed thanks to the wonderful drivers, the other patrons, and our parent volunteers. We learned that if we take off our backpacks and leave them on the floor by our feet, we can fit more people on. We also learned that it is important to be aware of our surroundings and give up our seats to other people who are in more need. Lastly, we learned that sometimes, the bus runs on it's own schedule and even though it says it's coming, it might not be here for an extra five to ten minutes. So, it's always good to be prepared and get to the bus stop early! Dell Lanes was a blast! Some of us lucked out and got some strikes whereas some of us got some gutter balls but we all had fun.
October 10th, 2019
Our Hallowe'en costumes are coming along... check out our progress!
October 9th, 2019
For the last week or so, we've been discussing media coverage of the upcoming federal election! We took a closer look at photos of the political candidates using Maclean's Election Image of the Day. We also took what we learned about starting sentences various ways in our lesson on creating sentence packs and wrote our own captions about the political images. Then, we compared what our captions said to the actual captions that ran on the magazine website. Check out what we came up with!
October 4th, 2019
Happy World Teachers Day! We became poets and poured our heart and soul into poems for the wonderful staff at the school! Everyone on staff got their own individual poems from one of the Grade Seven students. We used Kwame Alexander's book The Write Thing for inspiration on creating our poems. On Friday morning, we delivered all the poems to the staff's mailboxes and then served homemade cookies (that we baked at lunch on Thursday) and coffee or tea to everyone. What a wonderful day to express our gratitude!
September 25th, 2019
What a wild Wednesday morning! We spent the morning celebrating our grade seven community that we are continuing to build by having a potluck brunch! Thanks for all the contributions! There were cheddar biscuits, sausages, a cereal bar, fruit platters, and so much more! Afterwards, we launched our ADST project for the term - creating our own Hallowe'en costumes. We were encouraged to think about our ecological footprint. There are already some great group ideas like becoming a McDonalds Happy Meal and boxes of cereal. Stay tuned to see what we create!
September 20th, 2019
We spent the first couple science lessons using Discovery Ed Science Techbook to learn about physical and chemical properties of matter and the different states of matter. Then, we put our knowledge to the test when we used Apple Clips to film our Science of Apple Crumble videos where we explained the physical and chemical properties. We critiqued our videos and then are going to revise them so that the information is correct and clear.
September 18th, 2019
Check out some of our micrography portraits! The students filled their silhouettes with phrases and words that they identified with.
September 18th, 2019
Check out our Dot Day Video for 2019! The grade 7 students brainstormed about what makes them unique and then using the green screen effect in iMovie, they created 5 second clips. This was our first attempt at creating a video with a green screen and we learned that you need to time the "worm hole" effect just right so that it captures the right scene.
September 17th, 2019
We've been busy getting into the swing on things in Division 2 this year! We have 25 inspiring individuals in our classroom who have been busy working on collaborative math tasks, creating content with iMovie, making art with words, and doing so much more. We have a great year ahead!