It Costs What?

Today we went over the reading, "It Costs What?" and outlined the different parts of the world involved in the making of the shirt and the resources used and pollution created. We filled out this chart to help us map everything: "It Cost What-Chart". We talked about the reasons that a shirt is still so cheap after traveling so far. This leads into a short project that looks at resources and pollution. Tomorrow is our last class before the Thanksgiving break.

Bird Project Presentations Wrapped Up

Thursday and Friday we finished presenting our Bird Study Projects. Most of them went really well. Some of them were frustrated by the weather and by squirrels. Everyone was able to come up with something that they could work with. A few projects are still working on some challenges with formatting their wiki pages.
We started reading a short story about a t-shirt and its origins as raw materials. "It Costs What?" The rest of the reading is for homework, due on Monday, November 21st.

Peer Review

Monday and Tuesday we are doing peer reviews of each other's work. We are using the forms in the Investigator's Journal on pages 20 and 21 to guide us in giving constructive feedback to our rough drafts. Each person will give feedback to at least 2 people in their study group. And they will get feedback from the other folks in their study group. This gets everyone to look critically at other projects and to get ideas for how to improve their own project. We will spend these two days polishing our wikipages and preparing for our presentations on Thursday, November 17th.

Coming towards the end

We are getting close to finishing our bird investigations. Everyone is wrapping up their research, compiling data, making charts and graphs and formating their wikipages. By the beginning of next week everyone should have their reports just about finished. The rough drafts are due that Monday, November 14. They will then give feedback to their study/research teams and make the final improvements. Presentations will start on Thursday, November 17th. Tuesday we looked at four different types of graphs, from the Resource Page handouts, pp. 16-21. We looked at Pie charts, Bar graphs, Line graphs and Scatter plots and when to use each type.

Data Collection Week

This week we have a limited number of classes due to the block week schedule and the 4th year trip to see the documentary film on Thursday. So we only meet 3 times this week. Everyone should be set up to collect their data this week and come in on Monday, November 7th with all of their data collected so that they can start analyzing it and making graphs and charts to show their results.