Fantastic Fours

It was a very exciting day at Andrew Sibbald today. It is hard to believe that today the school participated in its 19th Big Brave Event. It was incredible to see so many students participating this year. The students were able to raise over $73 000 for The Big Brave. Today's event was such a fantastic celebration of the students hard work. Their efforts will help to send over 500 children to Camp Kindle. A huge thank you to all the families who helped to make this event a success.

The students in grade four have been reading a new book, The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau. The book tells the story of a city without natural light that is  t hreatened by an aging infrastructure and rapidly diminishing supplies. The book offers a variety of wonderful opportunities to connect to our science unit: Building Devices and Vehicles That Move. The students played the role of one of the jobs in the book, Pipeworks Laborer, and worked collaboratively to design a pipe system that could carry water from one place to another. This met the learning outcome:  Use simple forces to power or propel a device such as moving water downhill.

We had an incredible time during our weeklong Trickster residency. The group brought such a fantastic energy to our building. The week started with nothing but a medium, lights and bamboo poles and a general theme, Alberta's animals and simple machines. Within our first hour, the students had generated a variety of ideas. It was amazing to see how the ideas were pulled together by the end of the week. We so appreciated seeing so many families at our evening performance. We hope you enjoyed watching it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

This week, we continued our work with our food trucks by designing the interiors of our trucks. First, we looked at a variety of floor plans and brainstormed items that would be important within our trucks. The students then created their own floor plans. We then calculated the area and perimeters of the different items within our truck. Our focus was on the math learning outcome: demonstrates an understanding of area of regular and irregular 2D shapes.

The students have taken on the role of entrepreneur as they have been working on creating their own food trucks. We began by looking at food trucks within our own city, discussing the different names and logos. The students found that they were drawn to some logos more than others. We then came up with concepts for our own food trucks. The students experimented with different truck types, names and logos. They then did some market research, surveying their peers before selecting their final design. We then began working on developing our menus. The students worked to included a variety of descriptive language to make their menu more appealing to their customers. We had signature sauces drizzled on crispy chicken tenders, homestyle sesame crusted buns and hand pressed beef patties! We then researched food truck prices in Calgary to price our own menus. Next week, we integrate math into the project by creating our three dimensional truck and calculating the area and perimeters of our tru