January 27-Mesopotamia and more

Great work-we made over 1600 dollars for Haiti relief!  Wow!  And also about 360 dollars for the Nepal Library Association.  I am going to have to take a picture of our bulletin board with all your great projects describing this! 
Grade Sevens have an assignment on Mesopotamia and they need to visit the British Museum's section of Time and Mesopotamia.  Here is the website you will need.  By the end of using this website you should be able to tell me what a tell is and learn more about how we know what we know about Mesopotamia.  Happy digging!

A few days later -Wow!

This is a picture of Haitians receiving badly needed water! 
I can't believe that we have raised over 1000 since Monday to donate to UNICEF for Haiti!  It's amazing!  We were hoping for $300 but as the Trudeau community realized the need they certainly were generous! Plus we have made more money, over 200 dollars for the Nepal Library Association.  You have become champion fund raisers!  You should all feel very proud of yourselves for what you have done!  It's amazing what a small group of committed individuals can do!  That's a quote from someone!  You have really stepped up to the challenge. Well done!

Trying to Make the World a Better Place

The theme of the week seemed to be how to make the world a better place.  On Thursday we had a really great presentation by Allison and Paul Bird on the Nepal Library Foundation.  As you know our class sold journals and had a raffle and has already made over $300 for this cause.

Friday we decided to spearhead fund raising for Haiti earthquake victims with our campaign Help for Haiti which will begin Monday.  I  just watched a beautiful video entitled Together about Haiti, how we can work together to help these people rebuild their city.  On Tuesday people are asked to wear red to show support Haiti.  I plan to!


Friday we also had a great assembly put on by the We to Me Club and learned how we at Trudeau are going to finance building a school in India brick by brick.

Today I went to a presentation by Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea, and bought a copy of his new book, Stones into Schools.
  Greg Mortenson is changing lives building schools mainly for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

I am excited about our opportunity to help with all these projects.  I, personally, felt so inspired by hearing Greg Mortenson once again.  He told one story about how some village elders in Afghanistan, probably Taliban agreed to build a school after they spent an hour and a half playing in the playground at a school in another area.  They had never had the opportunity to play when they were children, living in a country at war.  The playground actually convinced them to build the high school for girls in their community.


The opportunity to play as well as  the opportunity to learn are two opportunities all children deserve.

Today's assignment for the Grade Seven's

We have been studying Mesopotamia.  Today you are going to become a farmer and learn more about irrigation.  Just go to this website from the British Museum.
You must follow the directions and take care of the fields.  Hints-you need to start write away-and be ready to do the next step when it is time.  I have had my crops fail several times.
When you are finished
1. Write the steps
2.Write about the challenges of being a farmer in Mesopotamia
3. What you learned about how they farmed there from this website!
4. Include a visual
This can be presented as a folded four page booklet with your visual showing what you have learned about farming on the cover, second page steps, third page challenges, fourth page what you have learned.
This picture is of a courtyard of a wealthy person from a neat website I found. I had difficulty finding a farming one but this one did show a canal!

Welcome back and welcome to Mesopotamia

Welcome back!  Two weeks sure goes quickly.  Anyway, the grade sevens are going to be studying Mesopotamia in the next while.  I found three great websites of you so I wanted to just put them on here.  The first is the British Museum one and we will be using that one a lot.  The next is the Oriental Museum in Chicago which I visited and first got me interested in Mesopotamia.  Finally I have given you one that accesses lots of resources for kids on Mesopotamia.  Grade sixes will be doing a unit on Japan with Ms. Wong so Social Studies should be lots of fun again this term!