Week # 16

We were 3 kids short today. Anaya, Eisa and Shaherbano couldn’t make it.

We kicked off the day with Alamgir recapping last weeks session for us. We briefly went over the blog posts the kids had done during the week and how it’s important that everyone does it.

Impromptu Speech

Next up, kids picked a topic each from the topic generator, prepared it for 3 minutes and then spoke about it for a more than a minute. Everyone did a fantastic job and we could clearly see that they are gaining confidence.

Song writing and poetry

I wanted to talk about poetry today so I picked one of my favourite songs and asked kids what they thought it meant. All of them came up with their own meaning and could see that the song was a lot more than it seemed. We also ventured into how music played an important role during periods of war and how artists feel about it.

Next, we briefly talked about nursery rhymes and how they aren’t generally what they seem too. For instance, “Baa, baa, black sheep” and how it is not really a poem about pleasant things but about taxes and slavery. Some of the kids knew about these hidden meanings in nursery rhymes and brought other examples to the table as well. The main idea about talking about poetry and deeper meanings in writing was to encourage them to write better and flex their creative muscles.

Replicating Instagram

I presented the kids with a problem to think about. Lets say someone gives them $30 million to create an exact copy of Instagram, how would they go about the project. They will think about this during the week and then we will pick it up next week again.

Household Spending

An assignment for this week was that each kid will come up with an estimate of how much their parents spend on running the household. They can’t ask the parents so they need to do their own research. They need to produce a written breakdown of each spending item and then we will verify with the parents next week if the estimate is close.

What if all ice melted?

This was a fantastic video selected by Amir for today. The kids said they actually felt a bit scared about the situation and we all should do something to make the situation better.

Other than talking about the scientific aspects of it, I asked the kids how do they know if the guy in the video is telling the truth? This started an interesting conversation about validating information. In the world we live in today, I think it is an important skill to gain to distinguish between good/reliable information and propaganda.

The kids will be thinking about ways to experimentally verify aspects of the video like what happens when you add salt to the water.