Monday, Oct 13 (No school)
Housekeeping: —
Homework: —
Lesson 1 - Tuesday, Oct 14
Housekeeping: Students still needing time to complete their Unit 6.1 Test were given time to do so, but this also meant Dr. M couldn’t return students’ graded tests until all Grade 6 students (in all three periods) have completed it.
1. On the front whiteboard, Dr. M asked students to provide the ‘Rules for life’ they brainstormed and wrote individually in their Science Journals during Parent’s Day. This discussion-based activity allowed students to challenge and/or modify each other’s ideas in a public forum.
2. Although C period did not get to the second stage of this activity, D and E periods started a new entry in their Science Notebooks titled, “Essential Features of Life.” These notes are now visible in the G6 Notes Portal.
Homework: There is no science homework assignment tonight.
Lesson 2 - Wed, Oct 15 (C, D) & Thu, Oct 16 (E)
Housekeeping: None
1. We used today to transform our notebooks into ‘proper’ Science Notebooks. To do this we inserted a pre-prepared Table of Contents (TOC) provided by Dr. M. We numbered our pages. We filled out the TOC. We labelled our entries with special codes (e.g., NTS, RA) and scientific-style dates.
2. We also created a new entry for the “Essential Features of Life” handout, which Dr. M prepared for students to save them some time and energy with respect to notetaking.
Homework: There is no science homework assignment tonight.
Lesson 3 - Friday, Oct 17
Housekeeping: Students who missed Lesson 2 were given copies of the Science Notebook Table of Contents (TOC) and the “Essential Features of Life” handout.
1. We used a short video to see if the ideas a Nobel Prize-winning biologist–who wrote a book called, What is Life? in 2020–could improve the “Essential Features of Life” handout we entered into our Science Notebooks in Lesson 2. We discovered that our handout is actually pretty good! But with some annotating (notetaking) and highlighting, we made some minor modifications to improve our important paper resource.
2. We will use our new-and-improved handout (on Monday) to help us determine if a collection of 20 ‘objects’ are living or non-living.
Homework: As per the TASIS MS school homework policy, there is no weekend science homework (due on Monday).
Announcements...
The DRIVING QUESTION of our current unit is: How do the microscopic structures and functions of a cell explain what it means for something to be alive?
C & D period homework collection days: Wednesday & Friday.
E period homework collection days: Tuesday & Thursday.
HEY! ...