Thursday, January 12, 2012

Reflecting on 2011

The highlights of 2011 were our Ellis Island Simulation and our Skype talk with the founder of International Peace Day, Jeremy Gilley.

As part of our PYP unit of inquiry on 'Moving On' about human migration, we used Ellis Island as a case study. So they could had empathy with immigrants, we created a simulation of Ellis Island Immigration Centre. The 4th Graders had to go through the different steps: leaving their baggage in the baggage hall, having medicals, taking the literacy and math tests. It was a wonderful experience as the participating immigration officials (teachers and grade 9 drama students) kept in role as they inspected the hopeful immigrants. Finally all immigrants were allowed to buy train tickets and head towards their new homes in America. It was the first time we had done this at LCS and it was a great learning experience. Here are some photos of the event:



The other big event of 2011 was our participation in The Global Peace Movie Project. Through my followers on Twitter I was invited to contribute a peace video to help celebrate Peace Day 2011. We linked this not only with LCS's celebration of Peace Day but also with our class work on Children's Rights. We discussed about where there were conflict hotspots in Africa and the children came up with a few. We then incorporated these in our short video clip.



Our participation in the video came to the attention of Peace One Day and they invited us to Skype with Jeremy Gilley, the founder of Peace One Day. This was such an exciting opportunity for our 4th graders and they were extremely excited to talk to this significant person.




You can also read about this on our LCS website

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