Shwmae everyone,
Literacy update:
Thank you to everybody that has managed to share your balanced argument (from last week - corona virus, uniform or homework) with me on J2E. Please remember to share your work with your debate team so that they can peer assess your work using the learning conversation tab (speech bubble) about WWW and EBI thinking about what makes it a good balanced argument - as I want to see comments from your peers before I add a comment (like we do in school).
There has been some confusion about the debate groups - I apologise but list I have isn't updated after we made changes to groups in class due to children being away but thank you to those who were involved in the Teams chats yesterday afternoon to go through this and for those who were away (when we did the initial planning for our debating on video games, dangerous sports, pets and does technology help children). These are the groups you need to share your work with - and complete this weeks collaborative activity.
There have been a few questions in relation to the 4 debates (mentioned above) that we began in class and you finished preparing next week. Once you have prepared the notes on what you would like to say you do not need to do anymore work on theses for now. I would like us to actually debate in our teams but how we actually do this I will need to think about, as we will need to do it at home. I will let you know after the Easter holidays how we will try and do it.
This weeks task is to discuss your thoughts on the police carrying guns argument. I can see that some people have tried to interact with people but maybe struggling to speak to their whole group together.
To help with progress what I suggest is that you all share your gun arguments with your group to give each other the opportunity to read each others work. Hopefully you will notice that lots of points other people have written are similar to yours though you may notice somebody has a different opinion to you on a point - this should help with the balanced argument as you can argue both sides of the point.
Maybe make some notes on what other people have written to help write your collaborative argument.
I still think it would be good for you to try and have a group chat (using the Teams app) to try and have a discussion about the topic as a group so you can all agree / disagree on the key points.
I will not set a deadline for this work for this week for those who have not managed to engage with a person in their team. If you have been unable to contact somebody in your team this week, they haven't responded to messages can you let me know via email so I can help to get them to make contact with you.
If you can get the finished collaborative work complete by the end of next week please.
Maths update: As last week I will submit answers for the problems for you to self-assess so try and complete the questions by Sunday please.
STEM
I can see some people have already completed their STEM boats - well done. If you still need time to complete your boat that is fine you can use the Easter holiday time if you need to.
How to test your finished boat - I would like you to test your boats in your bath. I was thinking about all adding the same items like coins or tins but it's unlikely that we would all have the identical things in our homes so can you get a weighing scales and just ensure you weigh the items that you load in to your boat so that you can record the overall weight that it supports. That way you can just use different things you have around your house. If you have items in your kitchen that specify their weight and are unopened it might be a good idea to use those.
Maybe you could take some photos of testing your boats or even a short video to show you loading the items in and how they affect your boat.
You can also give your boat a name as well if you wish.
I am more than happy that if your boat doesn't work as successfully as you'd hoped that you can try to redesign another boat if you have enough spare cardboard / time.
Diolch,
Mr Ball
