9/17/18 Monday:
What are the traits of a successful student? What are the responsibilities of a student? What does good teaching look like to you? This was our writing prompt for our logbooks on Monday. This writing prompt helped both ourselves and our teachers be more successful this year, by allowing us to explain the ways we like to be taught. We now understand what we need to do to be successful students too. After our thoughtful writing time, we transitioned into our rubrics which we had written over the weekend. We separated into groups according to the topics on the rubric we thought we could have the most impact in. From there we put together all of our ideas to complete a rubric which will be our replacement for letter grades this year in Quest. The rubric will help us track our progress throughout the year, and we will be able to see how much we have grown, and where we need to continue to improve. Before our log questions, and before our rubrics, we were introduced to another new aspect of Quest. We received our first geography assignment and started to put together our geography portfolio. Our assignment was to read and annotate an article, and then to answer all of the 5 questions. From this article, we gathered information about Singapore and how its geography helped it become an economic superpower. -Haila
9/18/18 Tuesday:
How did geography help Singapore become an economic superpower? This was the question posed on Monday when we received the article. On Tuesday we broke up into small groups, each group was given one of the 5 questions asked in the article. Then we came together as a class, to discuss each groups’ findings. Through answering all of the questions, we were able to understand how Singapore became so rich which is through trade. Spending time on geography was only part of our Quest study on Tuesday. Since we have more than one period of Quest, we broke into sections for each period. One period we had geography and the other period, you had English. In our English aspect of Quest we read for meaning. We had discussed reading for meaning before in a previous logbook prompt, and we have been focusing on short stories. This time we read a story and really tried to pick it apart piece by piece. We read Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man at the Bridge. It was a confusing short story with a lot of symbolism, but when you read for meaning you do not always have to understand what the writer is saying, at first. While reading, you can highlight, and annotate. We have been focusing on annotating and highlighting, and have been practicing more and more because this helps readers understand the story. Old Man at the Bridge was more difficult to understand when we read it at first, but as a class, we were able to figure out what Hemingway was trying to say, and what the story really meant. -Haila
9/19/18 Wednesday:
Wednesday was Yom Kippur, and we were off from school.
9/20/18 Thursday:
On Thursday we had a full mor
ning of Quest. We had a silent work time to check up on work and get ahead with our projects. This was our first time doing something like this, but everyone seemed to enjoy it. One of my classmates told me they, “Enjoyed Thursday a lot because it gave them a time to get organized and prepared for the next week.” We could work on one, or more, of five assignments written up on the board, this included: finish annotating Old Man at the Bridge, start our first vocabulary unit, writing our blog (if it was our week), a geography worksheet which was related to the work we did on Tuesday when we talked about the geography of Singapore, and our current events assignment. Thursday might have not been a day where the teachers presented a new lesson but we still learned new things and experienced different aspects of Quest.
During these past few weeks we were introduced to the idea of a current events assignment. Every two weeks, we will get a new current events assignment. These assignments will help us learn about the world we live in. Our assignment is an individual project where we find a news article. After finding an article on a topic that interests us, we annotate and highlight the article, to ensure that we understand the full meaning of the matter. We then summarize the article in 3-5 sentences and then answer a few prompt questions in 2-3 paragraphs. For example, why is this event significant and how does it connect to the work we are doing at MFS? This project is very interesting and important because we should all know what’s going on in the world around us. With our current events assignment, we will all be more informed, and have a better understanding of our world. -Ava
9/21/18 Friday:
On Friday, we came together as a grade, an
d were given a challenge, called the marshmallow challenge. We were given 20 uncooked pieces of spaghetti, a meter of tape, a meter of string and a marshmallow. We had to build the tallest tower we could with these materials. It was difficult, because we had to follow certain guidelines, and if they were not followed, we would be disqualified. The materials were very flimsy, and it was hard to build a tall tower that stood strong and tall. Afterwards, we broke into our sections, and we debriefed. We talked about the project, and what was successful, and not successful. This experience was related to Quest, because Quest is a challenge, and we need to be able to overcome hardships, and follow guidelines, to accomplish our goals. After, we played a fun game to talk about communication, which is so important in the way we live today. Overall, it was a fun, constructive way to end the week, learning valuable skills for life. -Jack D.
