Year: 2019

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Junior School Sports Day: Fill Your Bucket

On June 11, the 2019 Junior School Sports Day brought soaring temperatures and oodles of energy to the YHS campus. This year’s edition, “Fill Your Bucket”, was yet again a fun-filled afternoon. Sports Day is a relay-based event, with 40 teams rotating around 10 different stations. The language of bucket filling has become synonymous with being kind and thoughtful. All of the relay stations were built around the bucket filling theme.

As part of Sports Day, each student was asked to bring two items: 1) a $1 or $2 coin, and 2) a can of hearty stew or chilli to be donated during one of the ten Sports Day stations. The funds and food are for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank as summertime is actually the most challenging season for families in need of food support. Kids are out of school and families can no longer rely on the breakfast and lunch programs in school for the summer. Through the “Fill Your Bucket” Sports Day we donated 260 pounds of food and $448 to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank.

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Gr. 1s Engineer New Solutions to Our Favorite Fairytales

This winter, Grade 1 students were engaged in an integrated Literacy and STEAM unit on fairytales. Students were challenged to use their design and engineering skills to solve problems for characters in their favourite fairytales such as the Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Goldilocks.

We watched a clip from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and asked the students why in traditional fairytales, princesses are always saved by a prince. Then we had a discussion about what makes a princess today and the girls came up with their own criteria including strong, smart, creative, and kind. Then we asked: What would a princess do today if she were locked in a tower? Wait around for a prince to save her or use her engineering and design skills to save herself?

As our final challenge, students were asked to find another way for Rapunzel to get out of the tower without waiting around for a prince to rescue her!   

Students brainstormed different ways that Rapunzel could get out of the tower and came up with a long list, including parachutes, airplanes, chairlifts, elevators, water slides, and more! Then students worked with their group to determine one design to create together! Using their new iterative design skills, students tested and modified their designs as they went. They thought about how to keep Rapunzel safe and how to incorporate some of the engineering knowledge we had learned from the previous challenges including simple machines and cardboard engineering!

Jennifer Sharpe
STEAM Coordinator, Junior School