Last week, the Middle School was buzzing with the collaborator mindset in use, both in and outside of the classroom. From digital arts to life science, and all subjects in between, as collaborators, students are designing, reiterating, and producing evidence of their learning journey.
In life science, new MS teacher Kourtnay Abernathy is leading a unit on Cells and Cell Theory, encouraging students to make cultures of plant and animal cells using onions and their own cheek cells. Students worked together, making microscope slides and building skills in communication, teamwork, and scientific reasoning.
The slides they made together allowed them to create vivid observations by visualizing the structures of plant and animal cells, and being able to identify the differences.
During this unit, Abernathy put learning to real life, comparing the functions of a cell to what we need and use in our daily lives, helping students understand the job of the cell more clearly. Students were tasked with relating different parts of the cell to an everyday situation or item.
In Spanish, as the Mount Vernon community honors Hispanic Heritage Month, students are engaging in a variety of different activities, karaoke being one. By interpreting, analyzing, and explaining different pieces of media in Spanish, groups are helping to build cultural awareness.
As Hispanic Heritage Month wraps up this week, stay tuned for ways the divisions have celebrated cultural differences.
At Mount Vernon, we strive to be collaborators, while having fun, failing up, and sharing the well. While these are three examples of real-world learning from the past week, there are examples of all MV mindsets being used each day both in and outside of the classroom.
