Yesterday, despite hurricane and snowstorm, the inaugural issue of "The Mosaic Monthly" made its debut as scheduled!

Congratulations to the students on a successful first issue. This issue is the product of five journalism classes where students learned about the basic elements of a newspaper, how to write a news article, how to write a feature article, how to write an editorial, and peer editing. Please have your student compare their article(s) they wrote for the paper to the final article that appeared. There were not many edits for punctuation or grammar, but mainly for content or wording. Reviewing the final printed version should give them a sense of what corrections were needed.

Our December issue will see added pages and sections. We'll be taking on world and national news and learning how to write an "in-depth." We'll be revisiting interviewing skills so we can question possible sources for our articles. Conducting research will be a critical element of our next issue.

On Monday, we discussed the differences and similarities between proofing and copy editing and practiced both in class. We learned about AP Style and why it's important to adopt a style for a publication such as ours. For homework, students were given an article and an instruction sheet on how to revise the article for content. We edited for style and conventions (grammar and punctuation) in class. The students will need to incorporate those corrections into their edits for organization and content. While this is an actual article that has been re-arranged for the purpose of this exercise, there can be many good "answers" and I encourage the students to incorporate their individual creativity into their re-writes!

Welcome back to Creative Thinking! It has been three terribly long weeks since we last met and took time to question the why, the what, the how.

Yesterday's topic was Symmetry. We talked about "What is symmetry?" and made visual representations of our ideas about symmetry. Most children understood line or mirror symmetry, but rotational symmetry was a new concept to some. Here is a wonderful web-site that will give the student another visual on rotational symmetry: ROTATIONAL SYMMETRY

We played a game that involved placing cards with pictures of different types of symmetry (both line and rotational) on a Venn diagram. The children were very thoughtful during this activity and worked in two teams to arrive at the correct answers. They grasped this concept extremely well as both teams were very close to 100% accuracy!

We drew asymmetrical and symmetrical faces and laughed and voted on the ones we thought were the most attractive, the most un-attractive, and the most interesting. This led to a deeper discussion of why symmetry matters to humans, birds, and even insects. We completed a couple of puzzles and a mirror activity -- ask your student to show them to you and see if you can see the answers, too!

As an activity for home, I gave each student a circle. Fold the circle in half, in quarters, and then eighths. Within the 1/8 circle, draw jagged edges up one side and down the other. Cut only these inside lines out. Unfold and see what you have (instructions if you need them).

For more fun and practice with symmetry at home this week, please see:

Symmetry Artist
Ambigram Symmetry

We use curriculum from Art of Inquiry, LLC

As of Monday, November 12th, we are back in session after the long power outage . Classes will hopefully continue uninterrupted until Monday, December 17th, at which point we will break for the holidays until January 7th.  Our hope is to extend the semester from January 21st to January 28th. We will be back in touch shortly to confirm.

Looking forward to being together again on Monday.  Safe travels!

There is no power at Lamington Presbyterian Church. We will be in contact as soon as power is restored.

Stay warm!