Exploring Canada's History with Minecraft Education Edition

I’ve been working with teachers & students at different schools in Park West School Division to explore Canada’s history with Minecraft EDU projects designed by The Cobblestone Collective.

We have really enjoyed this creative way of thinking about Canada’s past, learning about history and sharing what we know about our history!

The Canada's History Crate from Cobblestone Collective (available as a free download here) includes suggested activities and video lessons guided by 2 teachers. Our learning activities included:

• Building a settlement in Minecraft
• Building the Canadian Pacific Railway
• Learning about Viola Desmond and her work to promote equity, inclusion and human rights
• Adding an equitable and accessible theatre to our settlements in honour of Viola Desmond
• Creating pixelated portraits to honour important Canadians from our past
• Learning about Truth & Reconciliation in Canada
• constructing a monument to honour the ongoing work of Truth & Reconciliation
• Researching modern changemakers in Canada
• Creating a non-player character to represent a modern changemaker that has made a difference in our country
• Considering what skills and talents we have that could be used to impact Canada and make a difference
• making a final improvement to our settlements that shows what we want to change in our local or global community

Here are some pieces of student work that showcase some elements of this project. All student work is shared with permission.

Take a tour of one group's project here: 

These screenshots show highlights of the settlement:

These portraits were created by the HCI Grade 6 class. Each team built a portrait and a sign to share information about the significant person they chose.

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A post shared by Mrs Obach (@mrsobach)

Classroom Energy Diet 2019

My grade 6 and 7 students are participating in the 2019 Classroom Energy Diet .  The challenge encourages classrooms across Canada to complete challenges to conserve energy and raise awareness about energy consumption.   We've learned quite a lot over the last several weeks and the challenges have inspired us to read, write, research and create!  I like that this kind of contest can be a springboard for meaningful learning or even project-based learning.    I wanted to share some of the great work my students have done as part of their contest.

Recycled Art

The task was to create art from recycling and my Grade 6/7 Character Education class rose to the challenge!  I kept this challenge fairly unstructured and let students plan their design, find the recycling items and develop their own creations as individuals or in small groups.   We ended up with a wonderful variety of art projects, including:  

• cardboard creations: a robot, a barn, a miniature city, Angry birds from toilet paper rolls
• cardboard canvases: students painted on recycled cardboard instead canvas or art paper
• paper mache from recycled newspaper
• pencil holders made from toilet paper rolls or plastic bottles
• a bird feeder made from a plastic bottle

One Hour, No Power

We've been turning off our lights, computers and power bars when we don't need to use devices to reduce energy consumption in our classroom and we challenged other classrooms to try it too! 

A student-created poster promoting One Hour, No Power

Energy-Saving Tips

For this challenge, we were tasked with researching energy-saving tips and sharing them in our school or online.   I provided a planning template to guide students in selecting a product to create, identifying a target audience and a platform for sharing.  Some students decided to create posters to share in our hallways and others created digital posters to share online.  One group wrote energy saving tips to share on our school's digital sign and another group presented to students at the elementary school.  One group launched a "game" and social media campaign - they posted small notes with energy-saving tips around the school and encouraged students to find the tips, photograph them and share them on social media.   

Energy Saving Tips inspired from @olcskinders.  @HamiotaSchools @Energy_Lit pic.twitter.com/ycE4VoUhlr

— Mrs. Obach's Class (@MrsObachsClass) April 11, 2019

Here are some tips for saving energy please share. #EnergyDietChallenge #parkwestSD pic.twitter.com/ZcDNDIwtuN

— Mrs. Obach's Class (@MrsObachsClass) April 10, 2019

Our Beliefs: Setting Classroom Expectations

My term position as LwICT teacher leader for my school division ended recently and I started teaching Grade 6 when second semester began on February 3rd.  I was interested in having students provide their input on classroom expectations, learning activities and classroom procedures/routines, so we spent some time in our first few days developing belief statements.  

First, I shared my own belief statement with students and talked about what those ideas mean to me.

Next, we did some brainstorming as a class.  We used the whiteboards to generate ideas in response to several questions.  We thought about what makes a good student, what makes a good teacher, what types of activities we'd like in our classroom, how we'd like to be treated, things we'd like to keep the same and things we'd like to change. The students gave some wonderful suggestions and we've been working on incorporating their ideas.

Our final step was to take the ideas from our brainstorming and summarize them into a class belief statement. The poster below is what our class came up with and I think it's a fabulous list of things to strive for!

The students requested that their belief statement be printed as a poster for our classroom and we're lucky to have a large-format printer in our school, so it now hangs in our classroom as a beautiful reminder of what we're working towards as a class!