Happy Easter! I hope that everyone had a restful Easter break and that the Easter bunny was generous to you. This week we have been working on gathering and interpreting information about our inquiry questions, and beginning to build our presentations. Keep in mind that the criteria for our presentations are:

• 5 slides
• Minimal to NO text
• Present the information as if you were the individual (first person) 

I am hoping that we will be ready to begin presenting on Thursday of next week. 

We also wrote our second School Wide Write this week. The topic choices were:

• How am I different from other people my age?
• What is my ideal Whitehorse?

An extra short week this week with lots of reflection and preparation for student-led conferences! We also spent some time working on our Renaissance Thinker projects, working hard to make sure that our inquiry questions were clear and focused, and most importantly open to research. Our learning goal is to avoid questions which are too narrow and limited to fact-based information (ie. When and where was this person born? What were their most famous achievements?).

This week we have been working on a project where we will be synthesizing our learning about some of the key Historical Thinking Concepts (significance, continuity & change, cause & consequence) and showing the impact that a particular innovator had on the European Renaissance. 

Our first step was to generate some background knowledge about our assigned thinker, and to develop 3 focus questions that would help us to explore the impact that they had on that time period and beyond. Once we have had our research questions approved, we can begin our investigation.