Summer SAVY 2018: Session 4, Day 4 – The Great Debate, Mr. Lee (Rising 3rd/4th)
Parents,
The week has flown by and the days feel shorter and shorter! We had an exciting and energetic start to the morning with the introduction of a new game. While the game was filled with laughter, it also taught important lessons regarding teamwork and how to best think on one’s feet. Day by day our class is demonstrating excellent sportsmanship – a part of what Aristotle would refer to as one’s “ethos” – and as a result our students have developed special relationships with one another.
As a follow-up to the game, we explored potential topics for Friday’s final debate. We have decided that we will either debate “Should Kids Be Allowed to Be Employed?” or “Should Schools Have More & Longer Recess?” We spent the morning exploring what we know — and what we do not know — about these topics, and then generated questions to help guide our afternoon research. We spent some time practicing how to form good, specific questions. We also watched an instructional video to better understand what it means to be a good researcher, how to identify reliable sources, and how to evaluate data for possible bias. We discussed how to gather credible information from the Internet – including why .gov, .edu, and .org sites tend to be more dependable than .com or .net, as well as the fickle nature of Wikipedia – and we made it a goal to implement our new investigatory strategies during our research time today.
After lunch with our friends, we spent about thirty minutes in the computer lab researching and gathering notes to prepare for tomorrow’s debate. We did a very good job practicing our typing and research skills.
To finish off the day, we spent the last few hours preparing and performing several mock debates, similar to what will happen tomorrow.
We learned a great deal from our performance this afternoon. If we can implement what we learned today, we anticipate a successful debate tomorrow! We are excited to show you what we’ve learned this week!
Thank you,
David Ian Lee (Instructor)
Niah Charles (Teaching Assistant)
Brainstorming Arguments For Our Final Debate
