Transcript

Every year our school participates in the Terry Fox Challenge and this is a great way to bring the learning into the classroom. Students are asked in every homeroom, over the course of a two-week period, to tally the number of times that they go around the school track. In my homeroom, we started to build off prior knowledge. We talked about what the students knew from last year and what they wanted to know a little bit more about Terry Fox this year. 

We began by looking at the Terry Fox Foundation website. Here, was a perfect opportunity to include elements of media studies. Students were able to look at the website, look at the interface of the page, and talk about how we could access that information. It was really a great way to start to get students to understand web pages, how to click on different dropdown menus and access the information, and also to understand whether or not the information is appropriate for them.

From here, we incorporated elements of writing. We talked about what it was to be a hero. Terry Fox possesses many of the qualities that represent a hero. We compared him to other heroes that we know; both from the past and present. 

The writing process came into play because students were asked to write about a hero that they know and they were asked to compare that person to Terry Fox. Students were given a graphic organizer where they had to write down similarities and differences to Terry Fox with the hero that they selected. From here, students were asked to put their work into paragraph format. They were first asked to first describe who the hero was that they had chosen, and then they were asked to list their similarities and differences with Terry Fox. Finally, they were asked to conclude their work. 

This challenge began to fuel my math program. Students started to ask amazing questions. They started to want to know how far it was to run a marathon. 26 miles. Where could we go 26 miles from the school? This also incorporated elements of geography because we started to talk about towns and cities that were approximately 26 miles from here, or stores or other things that may have come up. 

This challenge also allowed students to really look at elements of data management. They all had a personal tally in their math journals as well as a collective one that you see behind me where we would tally the number for every single student that day. We were also able to make predictions from our data. We started to see that every day, our number was growing and we started to provide reasoning as to why that was happening. A lot of students said that that is because we were practicing, because they were sleeping more at night, and because we were eating healthier. It was really interesting to see how students started making those connections. 
It was a great opportunity for students to set goals for themselves as well as a collective. We wanted to win this challenge. So every student had to set out to decide on their personal goal for the following day and we would talk about how we would accomplish our goal or the number of tallies for the day that followed. 

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