Feeding a Hungry World

Grade 5 took a field trip to central Tokyo to visit the Pasona office building. Tokyo is filled with office buildings, but Pasona is special-they grow all their own food in the building!

Students have been exploring the various ways people produce food around the world, and got a first hand look at what the future may hold.

Have a look at some photos from the day.

Grade 5 would like to thank the parent volunteers, Ms Carnright, and our translator- my lovely wife, Miki.  Thank you!

Located just minutes from Tokyo station, it is well worth a visit. Here is a link to their website:
Pasona Vertical Farm

October in Grade Five

We are now at the middle of October month, and approaching the 4th week of our Global Food Production unit. This week, Grade 5 focused on inquiring food production and distribution. Each student chose the following farming method groups: aquaculture, industrial farming, subsistence agriculture, and organic agriculture. Each group investigated how food was produced using the farming method. 

Unit 2 - Unit of Inquiry

How We Organize Ourselves

Global Food Production

Central Idea: People have developed systems for producing and distributing food around the world 

Lines of Inquiry: 

Food production and distribution 

Success Criteria: 

List and describe how food is produced using a farming method. 

Each student completed the given investigation note-taking handout to focus on how food is produced using their chosen farming method. 

Members of groups met with other groups to compare and contrast farming method. 

Afterward, students joined their groups to share and describe the farming method.

Quotes from students:

Gopika: “We were studying about Global Food Production. In this activity we were in groups and investigating about specific farming methods. The groups were industrial agriculture, subsistence agriculture, organic farming, and aquaculture. Within our groups we investigated and we compared our notes to each other.”

Kate: “Well, I think it went successfully since we were showing every graphic organizer.”

Mathematics

Grade 5 is just wrapping up a unit in mathematics exploring the idea that:

Fractions, decimals and percentages are ways of representing whole-part relationships.

Students started off the unit with a pre-assessment to help answer the questions:

How am I doing?

Where to next?

Students used the information from the pre-assessment to set goals for the unit, and the teachers used this information when planning learning activities.

As a tuning in activity and discussion starter, students briefly reflected on the question of “What is a fractional part, and what isn’t a fractional part?" 

Students used the image below to decide which shapes were divided into fractional parts and which weren't.

Which shapes are divided into fourths? Why are the others not considered to be fourths?

Throughout the unit, students had many opportunities to work both independently and collaboratively to construct meaning on a variety of concepts related to fractions.  Here are students constructing a fraction strip to help investigate fractional relationships.

After students had opportunities to sort out ideas and construct meaning, they were given more challenging problems to apply what they had learned.  Here are a few students discussing their problem solving strategies.

              

                                   

Below, Amy, Rosa and Limie use all they know about fractions, angles, measurement and ratio to follow a detailed set of blueprints to construct a house of precise dimensions. 

A few of the details:

-The length of the front wall of the house is 9/16 of the length of the paper.

-The roof angles in at 40 degrees from each top corner of the house. The top of the roof is parallel to the top of the front wall.

Applying what they know. Perhaps they should join the school renovation meetings.

We finished the unit with an assessment to check student progress and note areas we still need to work on. Students plotted their score and progress on our

Growth Mindset Graph. 

As you can see, most students land in the top-right quadrant, which is the high growth-high achievement quadrant-exactly where we want to be!

Ask your daughter which dot is hers.

Students discussed which dot represented the "best" score. It was a lively discussion with the verdict split between the far right dots and the dots at the top.  In fact, it inspired Limie to coin a new phrase:

"Improving makes good learning." -Limie Sanada 2016

Grade 5 Blog

By.  Kate Kamikubo  and Sanskriti Sinha

October has started and so Grade 5 is aiming to start our second Unit of Inquiry, Global Food Production on October 4th. Please refer to Seisen Website to view the details of our Unit of Inquiries.

Unit 2 - Unit of Inquiry

How We Organize Ourselves

Global Food Production

Central Idea:  People have developed systems for producing and distributing food around the world

Lines of Inquiry:

• Varying diets around the world
• Food production and distribution
• Sustainable practices in food production

Unit of Inquiry

Learning Intention:

• Tuning into the unit about varying diets around the world
• Food production and distribution

All students tuned in by doing an activity named Banana-Split in which all students got in groups and in each group divided 30 pences according to the job they were pretending to be.

Another way they tuned in was by making a mind map in which they were telling their balanced diet.

They did another activity to tune in to our unit by guessing and writing origin countries on post-it note. Then they stuck it on each fruit and vegetable sheet.