Dying to Live

“They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came out of it.

The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

Central Idea : Access to medical care around the world varies and can influence how diseases are spread.

Focus Key Concepts: 
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Form

​Change

Reflection

Provocation

We started the unit off by playing the board game PANDEMIC

Central Idea: Access to medical care around the world varies and can influence how diseases are spread. 

We just started off the unit on diseases. We thought of a title we could give the unit that was slightly more inspiring than"Diseases" and came up with "Dying to Live!" just for fun. It seems quite an apt one considering there is a continuous battle between our determined yet frustrated scientists and the pathogens that mock them by constantly evolving. In the meantime, we poor people are suffering. Our students hope to put a stop to this perpetual battle and close the pandora's box once and for all...

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During recess, when the students went off to play, Mr. O'Shea, my teaching partner, and I slyly applied a gooey modge-podge-glow-in-the-dark substance on the door handles. When the students arrived, we hoped they would get infected by the mock deadly bacteria that has been lurking in the school hallways. We declared an emergency and had the students tested by putting their hands under a UV machine which lit up the "bacteria" on their grubby fingers. The shrieks and moans were palpable and satisfactory.


As we learn about diseases, we are also learning to tackle complex non-fiction texts.

So far the big understanding has been:

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The students have been using various strategies to decode words. It's amazing how they are actually able to use the strategies and come u with ways to guess the meaning of difficult words!
Here is an example:
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I took a video of how the students were working with each other to figure out the type of text structure and main ideas implicit in a given text.

I love the way one student takes it upon herself to guide another student who was struggling. The partnership was clearly effective as the new student was eager to share her thoughts about the text. Student agency is all that out classroom is about!

In other news, our ICT teacher Mr.Towse hooked us on a mystery Skype session with Australia. We had great fun making up hints about where we are situated in the world.

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The first one reads..."Our houses are really well built."

The most fun we had this week was having a Mystery Skype session with Australia ( again!) arranged by Mr.Towse. We gave them some hints and they had to guess where in the world we were. We exchanged information about ourselves and what we were studying. It was a good way for the students to establish contacts with another school and communicate with each other in preparation for conducting future interviews for their Exhibition.



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Here is a snippet of Sora singing for her Australian audience.