Month: June 2010

artLeave a comment

Creating Clay Dragons

Deirdre Bailey

As the end of the year draws near, our students are completing many diverse and engaging projects. One of these is a grade 7 art project where students created clay dragons, using a number of foundational skills they had acquired. In this video, art teacher Lorrie Emin explains the details of the project: http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12801170&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1 Continue reading Creating Clay Dragons

school-cultureLeave a comment

Visit from the Dean of Education

Deirdre Bailey

On Thursday, June 10th the Calgary Science School hosted a number of special guests to our school. Dr. Dennis Sumara, the recently appointed Dean of Education from the University of Calgary, and Dr. Sharon Friesen, Associate Dean, were invited to CSS to experience the culture of our school first-hand. Also participating in the school visit were Dr. Garry Andrews, (Executive Director of the Alberta Charter Schools Association) Dr. Robert St. Onge, (Director at Alberta Learning), Dr. Bonnie Shapiro (Professor of Science Education) and Joanne Steinmann, (Alberta Initiative for School Improvement, University of Calgary) as well as members of the CSS … Continue reading Visit from the Dean of Education

artLeave a comment

Learning to Draw the Human Shape

Deirdre Bailey

Our grade 6 students have just wrapped up the tracing project that they’ve been working on through the last semester. As written about before, this is a project designed to have students learn to draw what they see, not what they think they see! After doing the tracing through the glass, students transfer their drawings to water color paper, and then design and complete the full painting with background. Here’s a short video on the entire project, complete with numerous examples of the finished student work: http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12617013&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1 Continue reading Learning to Draw the Human Shape

grade8, science, technologyLeave a comment

Virtual Machines: Final Projects

Deirdre Bailey

Over the last few weeks, our grade 8 students have been working on virtual Rube Goldberg Machines, using a physics simulator called Phun. The planning documents and rubric for the project can be found here. For the assessment of the work, the teachers really wanted to focus on the students’ understanding of the various simple machines they were expected to build into their complex machine. With that in mind, the students were asked to create voice-over narrations of their machines – being asked to explain how the different machines combined and transferred the energy through the system. One of the … Continue reading Virtual Machines: Final Projects