We will start off the year with Global Settlements - Patterns and Sustainability, a timely topic given the mass groups of immigrants leaving and entering many countries around the Globe. What causes people to leave? Where should they go and why? Can these places sustain so many people? Each day we will have "Current Events" topic presented by a student. Students will be assigned a date and will have plenty of time to find an article. We will practise several times before presenting. The assignment will be sent home the first few weeks of school. The final project for this topic will be "Building your own sustainable country".  

The first assignment of the year will be "In the News". Each student will read an article of interest, world news related (not sports or local crimes), give the main idea (short 4-5 sentence summary), state their opinion and reasoning behind the opinion, and then create 3 to 4 questions the student has about the article and to stimulate a discussion in class. 

Dates will be given out after the first week of school, which I will post below. 

Learning how to question information is a major part of the Geography and History curriculum. Forming strong questions will help guide their learning AND will create projects for the students, on topics they are interested.

The students have been reading and discussing what makes a country, like Canada, good to live in and what makes people leave their countries. Their project that they have been working on for the entire month of October, is "The Worst Place in the World". They had to find a country that needs our help. They are to have information about the country, but also prove why it needs our assistance. To do this, they need to have a presentation filled with images, graphs, and information they can analyse and convince their classmates, we should help this country.

ALL presentations are due Monday, October 30th. The students have had over a month in class to work on this. 

They also discussed how they should be assessed. Details, quality of information, and convincing presentation will be the main part of the mark.