Revel Recap: October 30 - November 3, 2023
Spark Studio
Mindfulness
We began our snowy Monday morning in the Spark Studio, reading the book Alpha Oops! H is for Halloween, which inspired us to turn letters into pictures! We brainstormed spooky ideas as a group and put on some Halloween music. Then, each learner received a paper with the letter S and transformed it into a creepy picture! On Tuesday, the Sparks had fun walking the red carpet and showing off their awesome Halloween costumes! After we settled in for the day, we worked on completing a fun, directed drawing of Halloween candy. On Wednesday, two Spark learners led the studio through a yoga sequence using Yoga Pretzel cards. On Thursday, we used our imaginations to create a story together using story picture cards for prompts. We ended the week listening to a song about being thankful. We then looked at pictures of situations that might upset us; for example, a picture of someone who got mud all over their new boots. We challenged the Sparks to think of things in each situation that they could still be grateful for. We will be posting their answers at the Exhibition for you to see all of their positive thoughts!
Quest
This week, the Sparks explored devices that help us to measure the weather. To learn more about these instruments, we read the book What Will the Weather Be and watched a short science video on the six most common weather instruments that meteorologists use. We then read through instructions for making a rain gauge. We broke off into teams, and everyone gathered their supplies. We used recycled pop bottles and meter sticks to write the inches on the bottle accurately. We put a bit of stones and water in the bottom and set them outside in our garden. We will measure how much rain we collect for the rest of the session. For the next two days, we focused on instruments that measure the wind. First up, we read the book A Windy Day. We talked about how wind is air moving around us and learned how to describe how fast a wind is blowing using the words gust and gale. Then, we set off in our groups to make anemometers. Be sure to ask your weather expert what this tool measures. The learners showed a lot of patience and teamwork in putting together these devices. When we were finished, we tested them, and the Sparks were delighted to see their experiment in action! The next day, we started by reading Whoosh Went the Wind. We discussed more about wind direction and learned about windsocks before making our own. We ended the week by sharing our weather-related tools from home. Thank you to the learners for bringing in some fascinating instruments! Next week, our learners will become meteorologists and create weather reports!
Geography
This week, we continued working on our Me on the Map project. First, we talked about the city we live in. We watched a video tour of Ottawa, highlighting many landmarks such as the Parliament Buildings, the Rideau Canal, the Byward Market (with the Beavertail stand!), walking trails, and many museums. The Sparks reflected on some of the places from the video that they have been to before in our beautiful city. They completed their city page by drawing the canal or the Parliament buildings. We also worked on our school page. Some Rebels used the Revel logo, while others drew the actual building. We are one step closer to completing our project, which will be revealed to our families soon!
Math
We began our math workshop by continuing our counting practice, picking up where we left off a couple of weeks ago. Again, we used our number boards and cards and placed them out of sequence. The Sparks counted from 60 to 100. Bravo on recognizing these significant numbers, mathematicians! We then moved on to this week's workshop, a variety of math centres that the learners rotated through. They had the opportunity to work on an autumn colouring pattern worksheet, card games like Go Fish!, and a roll-to-one-hundred dice game.
Reader/Writer Workshops
On Monday, we read the story Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. After reviewing a few story elements, such as the characters and setting, the Sparks had two choices for their creative writing piece. The first was to draw a picture and write about whom there was room for on their broom. The second option was to design a magical broom and write about what unique elements it had. We always love seeing all the creative ideas the learners come up with!
We also had a new batch of flash words: if, us and an. These are phonetically decodable, so we worked together to sound out these high-frequency words. We also enjoyed listening to a song about these words, and then each got out our writing books and practiced writing them a few times independently.
Art
For our art workshop, each learner painted dots on a piece of cardstock. Then, using our decorative edge craft scissors, we cut out paper strips. We glued these to our papers to create 3D images. Not only did these abstract art pieces turn out beautifully, but it was the perfect activity to practice our cutting and gluing skills!
French
This week in French, we celebrated Halloween! On Monday, we made a craft with a little witch and a ghost coming out of a pumpkin to practice our Halloween vocabulary in French. We listened to the "C'est l'Halloween" video to learn the song and review our Halloween terms on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, we played in the gym to review this week's lessons. Lastly, on Thursday, we completed an art activity to continue learning about the four seasons.
Additional Highlights
Along with all the superb work materials from the shelves, the learners had a few different activities they could choose to work on this week during our work periods. There were stencils and paper, rainbow scratch creations, word searches, and a Halloween-themed literacy write-the-room where they had to identify the missing beginning letter of each word they found. Our practical life activity this week was washing chairs. Using soap, water and a scrub brush, the Sparks worked to make the chairs glistening clean! A big thank you to one of our Spark learners who was shown this activity and then took the lead in teaching many of the other learners the steps!
We had a lot of fun celebrating Halloween together. The Sparks enjoyed showing off their wonderful costumes on the red carpet for all their families to see. Thank you to our Exploration friends for putting on a fantastic trick-or-treat event in the afternoon!
Discovery Studio
Mindfulness
On Mantra Monday, the Rebels coloured statements like "I can do hard things" or "You are loved," then we discussed the concept of unconditional positive regard. The Guides want all Rebels to know that we care about them, they have value, they don't have to do anything to prove it to us, and there is nothing they can do to change our minds! On Tuesday, Rebels strutted the red carpet in their Halloween costumes! Wednesday was a "Choose your own adventure," which saw Rebels completing puzzles, colouring Halloween Zen doodles, and spooky mazes. Thursday, we continued to work on our origami fox from last week, and for Feel-Good Friday, we warmed up with our Boomwhacker scales and chords and then tried to play the Super Mario Bros. intro tune!
Launches
Monday's Launch reviewed the schedule changes for the week to include Halloween celebrations, safety around candy, and sharing treats at school. Rebels participated in a fun A or B debate about whether or not Trick-Or-Treating should always fall on October 31st (even if it's a weeknight!) or should it be on the weekend before Halloween so that they could have a later night/not disrupt school morning routines? Tuesday morning, Rebels celebrated each other's costumes at the Halloween Creepy Catwalk and prepped for another round of IOWA tests. Wednesday morning's Squad Chickens allowed Rebels to check in on panic zone goals and comfort zone goals of the week, as well as a catch-up with their Squad on their favourite memories from Halloween this year. On Thursday, we had a special Launch to welcome a visiting learner for their Exploration Day. Rebels introduced their name, pronouns, and then chose a personal cool fact - some even shared the colour of their toothbrush! Friday's Current Events report featured Halloween night highlights like the New York City "Thriller" flash mob or the giant drone skeleton in Dubai and a debate about hockey equipment and safety.
Reader/Writer
Rebels took a deep dive into character development during our third session workshop. As Rebels continue to develop their fictional stories, we question how to bring our fictional characters to life. Rebels learned about an author's creative writing technique called Interviewing a Character, where Rebels drafted a series of interview questions that they would "ask" one of the characters in their story to learn more about them. Rebels used Peter from our Session 1 Book Club story, Pax, to test this strategy. After "interviewing" Peter, the Rebels realized the differences and similarities each of them had when they visualized who Peter was. Rebels could tell each other what eye and hair colour they thought Peter had, but also how his love and interest in baseball made them think of him as having an athletic body type. We knew that thinking about the love Peter had for his mother or his pet fox could make him cry and that his biggest fear was losing everyone he loved. Thinking about these types of details and how characters would respond to these interview questions, Rebels used their personal characters from the stories they are creating to expand their writing more deeply.
Math Lab
The Rebels accomplished so much during this week's busy lab! This week was a very busy lab and the Rebels accomplished a lot! First, we reviewed a strategy for general problem-solving called CUBES. We focussed on the first three letters: Circling important numbers, Underlining the actual question words, and Boxing clue words that link with the different operations. After discussing some examples, Rebels were tasked with using the strategy in their Problem of the Week work. Then, Rebels worked on either an addition and subtraction workout or one for multiplication and division. Lastly, Rebels carefully inspected the nutrition facts on Yum Earth's Giggles candy. Next week, we will compare the serving size and sugar content to the Real Fruit candy data from last week.
French
This week, we've been revising how to ask questions in French by playing two Halloween vocabulary games. We also spent time making our artifacts for our Revel museum!
Civilizations
Our read-aloud featured Richard I and his crusade. Along the way, Rebels heard the tale of his brother John Lackland, as well as Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. We mapped the journey from England to Jerusalem and Jerusalem to Austria, as the Duke of Austria was also a key player. Learners discussed the actions of Richard, John, and the Duke in great detail, considering if the imprisonment of Richard was a suitable consequence for putting the Duke's banner in the mud. We also reflected on the Magna Carta and how things changed from kings having power to the law being the power that governs a society. Some Rebels connected this to the term outlaw and argued that although Robin Hood acted against the king of the time, his actions were just.
Quest
This week was all about the Chemistry of Candy! Working with three different types of candies for each experiment (Peeps, Gummy Bears, and Candy Corn), Rebels observed the different reactions sweets had with various liquids. How does vinegar react with sugar? How does baking soda react with marshmallows? How does water affect the texture of each candy? What does permeable mean and how can we determine if an ingredient is very, low or semi-permeable? What is osmosis? Rebels made predictions and observed each experiment over the course of several days, revisiting their observation logs and drawing conclusions about how different ingredients change in different ways. We tied it all together on Thursday with a series of reflection questions: What can we take away from these experiments? How can we apply what we have learned about these ingredients and reactions to create our edible slime next week? How did our team work together? Who do I want to work with for the next two weeks? For the remainder of Quest, Rebels will take what they have learned in Weeks 1, 2, and 3 to invent their own edible slime to showcase at Revel's first Edible Slime Show during week 6. Great work, Rebels! We can't wait to see what you create!
Physical Development
On Tuesday, we had fun trick-or-treating during our usual physical development time. On Thursday, we all headed outside, and the learners could choose between playing basketball or having some free-play fun on the playground.
Additional Highlights
Our Halloween celebrations this year were so much fun! Thank you to all Rebels and families who joined us for the Creepy Catwalk and our Exploration and Launchpad Rebels for putting on a Revel Trick-or-Treat celebration in the afternoon. If you would like to donate your leftover Halloween candy to Shawna's Outreach or Giving Gertie, please drop off your leftover Halloween candy to one of the Guides by November 17th.
Congratulations to all of our Rebels who completed IOWA testing this week! Discovery, Exploration, and Launchpad studios showed much perseverance and grit as they worked through the tests. Great work, Rebels!
Exploration
Mindfulness and Launch
Monday morning, Exploration Rebels learned how spiders build their incredible webs while they painted beautiful watercolour art pieces. Our annual Spooky Red Carpet Walk-Off was held on Tuesday, and the learners had a great time showing off their amazing Halloween costumes! On Día de los Muertos, we learned how to draw a sugar skull and discussed Day of the Dead customs. Our Thursday yoga session focused on deep core work and "adding on" to a sequence that required more effort with every pose. Rebels challenged themselves with a side plank extension and hold, as well as capping off practice by setting a personal intention to take with us through the rest of the day. After yoga, we learned about Survivorship bias by studying the reinforcements made on WW2 planes. Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. After free choice mindfulness, we were treated to this week's Rebel-led Current Events.
Quest - The Science of Where
This week, the Rebels extended what they have been learning about geographic information systems (GIS) and quantitative data and grounded it in the Canadian context. On Monday, they worked with layers of data in an ArcGIS web map to look for patterns in the location of Canada's capital cities and some major landforms like mountain ranges or large bodies of water. On Tuesday, they used another ArcGIS web map to explore the seven physiographic regions of Canada and their significant landforms, focusing on human activity in the regions. On Wednesday, the Rebels studied another Canadian web map all about Canada's energy mix. They were able to investigate nine energy types and how prominent these are across the country. Thursday's time was available for the Rebels to catch up on the three previous activities. Ensuring they have an opportunity to complete these is essential, as starting next week, they will begin to use the ArcGIS platform to author their own maps. If they were all caught up, Rebels could choose what they would like to investigate further. They were provided a suggested list of web maps about critical issues in Canadian geography, such as food scarcity, population policy or oceans and fisheries.
Math Lab
Rebels were finally able to take charge of their travel itinerary this week, as many successfully completed their credit card applications! They had time to research how they will travel from Dungeness, Washington, back to Ottawa with many searching flight costs and determining how they could get from the coastal town to the airport. Some Rebels are choosing to become travel buddies and work on a plan together. For each purchase that they plan to make, they must keep track on their credit card statement, noting the transaction number, the company/good/service purchased, the cost, and exchange to Canadian Dollars (CAD) from United States Dollars (USD) if required, the foreign transaction fee if applicable, and any cash back, Scene or PC Points earned from their purchase.
Civilization
This week, we turned our attention to Africa and the conflict between the Zulus and European colonists. After learning more about the natural resources of Africa, the learners put themselves in the shoes of the Zulu leadership. They discussed the decisions they would make in a similar situation.
Reader/Writer
Rebels jumped into their provincial travel guides research projects this week as they discussed the most essential elements of a travel guide. What parts of a province can we emphasize or showcase to attract the largest audience? What provincial attractions would target different age groups? How can we incorporate persuasive techniques into our writing? Using a research packet as a guiding outline for the next few weeks, Rebels will highlight parts of their chosen provinces and pair them with persuasive descriptions, captions and headlines.
French
To celebrate Halloween, we played the Werewolf game, in which Rebels have to discover who the werewolves are among the villagers. On Wednesday, we learned to conjugate colours in French and practiced descriptions. Madame Marianne then read descriptions of haunted houses, and the learners had to draw what they understood. We also learned the song "Sur, sous, devant, derrière" to remind us of the prepositions of place.
Additional Highlights
On Halloween, the Exploration Rebels organized a fun Trick-or-Treating event for the whole school. Thank you, Rebels!
Launchpad
Physics
We began our physics sessions this week learning about Robert Hooke's work and his heated war of words with Isaac Newton. Rebels then took the class to study Hooke's law, learn about spring constants, and figure out the exact steps they would follow to measure the spring constant of a spring or a bungee. We ended our class with a discussion on the two basic archetypes of physicists; theorists, and experimentalists and reflected on which type they were.
Do larger or smaller pumpkins roll faster down a ramp? To celebrate Halloween, Launchpad utilized their PocketLab Voyager 2 sensors to investigate how a pumpkin's size affects its angular velocity. They then calculated the linear velocity using the pumpkin's circumference and angular velocity.
On Wednesday, Launchpad measured and recorded the spring constant (k) of three different bungees of their choice. For each bungee/spring, they also had to draw a plot graph with at least three data points. On Thursday, learners participated in the Mission - Difficult, but Possible challenge! Using what they knew about Hooke's Law, learners had to construct a precision bungee using eight rubber bands or less so that Mr. Eggthan Hunt could successfully drop down from the ceiling to steal the top secret "NOC List." His resting state (rather than max stretch) is the critical component of the problem. Lastly, on Friday, the Rebels put it all together. Using the two equations they have learned related to the physics of springs, they solved a series of problems identifying which equation to use in each case.
World History
This week we turned our attention to ancient Greece. Learners self-organized into two groups of three, with one group researching Sparta and the other three focusing on Athens. After completing their research, the learners compared their findings in a learner-led Socratic discussion.
French
To celebrate Halloween, we played the Werewolf game, in which Rebels have to discover who the werewolves are among the villagers. On Wednesday, we learned to conjugate colours in French and practiced descriptions. Madame Marianne then read descriptions of haunted houses, and the learners had to draw what they understood. We also learned the song "Sur, sous, devant, derrière" to remind us of the prepositions of place.
Creative Writing
This week in Creative Writing, learners tackled the art of Spoken Word. On Monday, learners listened to audio recordings by various artists with different identities, styles, and approaches to their work. As they listened, they took notes about what they noticed, liked, and what didn't work for them. They also jotted down how the artist used rhythm, rhyme, repetition, musicality, and sound, as well as what techniques or styles they may want to try in their work. On Tuesday, we discussed our notes from Monday's listening lab. We began talking about points of inspiration. What moved you? What has stuck with you? What impressed you? What made you think? Which turns of phrase did you like? Which artists or techniques did you find compelling? We then dissected what didn't work. What rang hollow? What did you find ineffective or frustrating to listen to? What lines left you wishing they had been edited out of the poem before it was recorded, and why? What would you absolutely never do in your work after hearing someone else do it? It was then time to get to work and create a spoken word mini-poem, which we then shared with the group on Thursday.
NGA - Launchpad
This week in their Next Great Adventure, learners began the Reality Hits challenges. They worked on coming up with their "number," the amount of money they would need to live the life they had envisioned. They also reflected on their monsters, and at least one learner completed the Art of Haggling challenge while at a hockey tournament!
Additional Highlights
The Launchpad learners spent most of their Core Skills time completing this year's IOWA subtests. Great perseverance, Rebels!
Potential Discussion Ideas or Questions to Ask Your Rebel:
Spark
What does an anemometer measure?
What three weather instruments did you make in Quest this week?
What are the steps to washing a chair?
If you could design a magical broom, what special features would it have?
Discovery
Quest: What is Osmosis? What does permeable mean?
Quest: Which candy experiment was your favourite from this week?
Reader/Writer: What kind of "interview questions" did you ask your main character?
Math Lab: What is the CUBES strategy, and what does it help you to do?
Exploration
Quest: What do you believe are the most critical issues in Canada right now?
Quest: When you had to navigate different layers of the ArcGIS web maps this week, did it put you in your panic, challenge or comfort zone?
Reader/Writer: Which province are you creating a travel guide about? What persuasive techniques will you use to persuade your audience to visit?
Math Lab: How far from Dungeness, Washington, have you been able to travel, and how much of your $5000 limit have you charged to your credit card?
Civ: As the leader of the Zulus, you see European settlers advancing on your land. Do you:
Start a war because your way of life and land are worth dying for;
Attempt to make peace, even if it means foreigners colonize your land; or
Flee your land to start life over somewhere else?
Launchpad
There are some who believe there is no need for tension and hostility in science, while others suggest that, so long as relative professionalism is maintained, it elevates competition and yields more inspired work and, in turn, discoveries. A metaphor could be a debate on capitalism and economic systems, detailing the pros and cons of competition. Which side do you take? Is peaceful, field-wise collaboration healthier in science? Or does competition get the best result?
Why do you believe democracy first arose in Athens instead of Sparta? Was it because Athens had more wealth? Because it was a more sheltered city-state? Or was this development simply an accident?
Which argument against democracy is most powerful?
Aprioristic Equality – all votes are not equal
Populism – whoever is willing to say what it takes to be most popular wins
Tribal Mentality – people vote for their "group" instead of their best interest
Corruption – politicians accept money/votes in exchange for jobs and laws
Entitlements – politicians never stop services that people expect to stay in office
Mob Rule – minorities always lose in a true democracy
Complex Accountability – are voters responsible for electing bad officials
State Secrets – transparent democracy would ban helpful covert operations
Democracy Is Unsustainable – large numbers of people "waste their vote"
It Can't Really Work – true democracies mathematically do not work
Dates of Interest
School Photos - Wednesday, November 8th and Thursday, November 9th
Session 2 Exhibitions
Spark - Wednesday, November 22nd, 4:15 - 5:30 p.m.
Discovery - Tuesday, November 21st, 4:15 - 5:30 p.m.
Exploration - Wednesday, November 22nd, 4:15 - 5:30 p.m.
Launchpad - Tuesday, November 21st, 4:15 - 5:30 p.m.
Yearbook Cover Contest deadline to submit Rebel artwork - Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023
Sessional Break - Thursday, November 23rd and Friday, November 24th