Millarville's Cool News

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Entrpreneurial spirit is thriving at Millarville Community School. The Grade 5 class have been inquiring about entrepreneurship in the IB Transdisciplinary Theme “How we Organize Ourselves”. Through creating a real Mini Mall, students learn about math and develop business plans. These real life experiences foster questions about supply and demand, marketing, pricing and diversifying products and how economic issues impact sales. Every class excitedly looks forward for their time to come and shop. Comments from business owners: Mini Mall teaches you how to start your own business and how to keep it running. It's like owning your own piece of land as our businesses have to pay rent, which is an expense. You learn a lot about math whether you are behind the counter selling services and products or whether you are a customer deciding which special items to buy. We learned that money historically looked very different than the money we have now – cocoa beans, cowry shells, roman dimarius, Yap stones, kissi pennies. Can you imagine? Weird!

Our Spring Gala took place April 7th. The entire school came together to create events, bucket raffles and silent auction items to raise money for Fine Arts and this year for the Japan Relief Fund. Students created a variety of businesses, selling such products as cookies, jewelry, school supplies and services such as Goalie Shoot, Bunny Shoot, Fish Pond, Ring Toss, Cake Walk, Tape the Teacher and an Amazing Maze. We would like to thank all the businesses and parents who donated special items and to our Fundraising Group for their organizational wizardry.

Reading continues to be a huge focus at our school. Grades 4-6 participated in the Reading Give It a Shot Program. In this program, students recorded minutes read and received Calgary Flames bookmarks. Shannon White was chosen from our school to go to a Flames game April 6th. She is very excited as she has never been to a NHL hockey game before. She thinks this reading program helps students set goals and allows students to let their imagination run free.

To conclude our Powerful Forces Inquiry, students had to build a vehicle that would move. Everyone became experts in designing circuits to power their machines. We had to try and try again with our designs and received lots of tips from others in the class. Race day was crazy, wet and awesome.

This time of year is very hectic for Grade six students as they present their IB Inquiry Exhibition projects.
Comments from these critical thinkers: We had to do research on the questions we wanted to find information about and find experts to answer our questions. We learned that even if it is hard at first, now that we are almost ready to present what we have learned to our peers, it is quite easy. I spent lots of time really deciding on my topic and questions. It is quite different than just doing research. You have to connect your learning to the whole world and how it is changing and developing. We had to think of other's perspectives. It's much more depth than you would think. Grade six students would like to thank their Mentors for their guidance and expertise. The culmination of this learning will take place when these experts present their conclusions to other classes in the school and finally to their parents April 13th.

Ian Dutton
The Grade 2's have accidently fallen into a wonderful learning situation. Earlier in the year, while in a pattern inquiry, Izaak brought in a book of patterns for the class to look at. It was decided that our favourite patterns were created by a British artist named Ian Dutton. We found his website, www.ianduttondesigns.com and looked at more of his work. The class had some questions about his patterns so they emailed him. Surprise! He emailed us from his studio in England. Over the last few months, the class has been emailing Mr. Dutton or Skyping him to learn more about patterns. We have also had the great fortune to have Mr. Dutton give us art lessons via Skype.

The biggest surprise of all is that Mr. Dutton is now coming to visit us at our school. For the first week of May, Mr. Dutton will be an Artist in Residence, working with everyone at Millarville Community School! Exciting!