Six Word Memoirs

I've been sharing this Six Word Memoir learning activity created by Sarah Landis & Lisa Highfill with my colleagues.  I've also tried it out with a few classes and found it to be an engaging writing activity with some great options for infusing technology.  If you want to try this out, use the link to Landis & Highfill's hyperdoc above to get started!   

When I shared this activity in classrooms, we began by viewing a moving video called "The Conditioned" which is about a man named Raimundo and his life.  I've watched it several times now and it's super powerful every time.  

Students were then tasked with developing a six-word memoir to describe Raimundo's life.  Some of our Park West School Division students posted their completed memoirs to Padlet, so you can see samples  below:

Next, students thought about their own lives and wrote six word memoirs for themselves.  This was a bit more challenging, but students came up with some excellent memoirs to highlight their lives.  Once they'd chosen their six words, students designed a digital poster to share their memoirs.  Some classes used  Google Slides to put together their images and text and other classes used Canva to design their digital posters.  They turned out to be beautiful pieces of work and several students agreed to let me share their memoirs.  You can see some student samples below, courtesy of Mr. Baskerville's Grade 6 class and Mrs. Bowley's Grade 6/7 class.  

Cookies for Tanzania: A service learning project & video contest winner!

Congratulations to the Decker Colony School students in Mr. Elias Wipf's ELA class for winning the Next Vista for Learning Service via Video contest!  Their wining video, Cookies for Tanzania, tells the story of how their school has been supporting projects in Tanzania through their fundraising efforts over the past few years. This contest was created to encourage young people to "tell stories of people serving their communities" through video creation. 

The Cookies for Tanzania fundraiser sales were put on hold this year due to COVID, but this group of students found a way to continue contributing to the cause by raising awareness with their video.  Four students collaboratively planned and created the video, including sourcing images, writing a script and narrating the video to tell their story.  They also worked with students, parents and community members to obtain the permissions required for people appearing in the video.  The resulting video is a great showcase for this service learning project -- be sure to watch it below!

The video is now featured in the Next Vista for Learning video library.  

Congratulations to Matt, Gabe, Jesse and Abby on a job well done and to Elias for supporting his students in their video production project!