This week, the focus of Genre was on choosing a biography. On Monday, we wrote publishing pitches to hook our audience and get them interested in our biographies. We wrote the pitches using our imagination or the formats we were given and then requested a critique from another learner. Finally, we shared these pitches and voted on which ones would be shared at the exhibition.
Quest this week focused on getting things ready for the exhibition. We started with a practice round of Biology-Bee Jeopardy to get everyone familiar with the format. We then learned about the biogeochemical cycle and explored biomes and ecosystems. To conclude, we chose to draw a biome’s food cycle or explain the characters of one of the biomes.
The Civ question this week focused on the political aspect of medieval philosophers:
It’s the 20th Century, and you and your fellow founders are composing the constitution of your new country where almost 100% of the citizens practice the same religion. Do you:
· imitate the American mixed-constitution, foregoing formal establishment of the region;
· create a theocracy where the church controls the government; or
· create a monarchy in the style of these medieval thinkers, featuring a single, all-powerful philosopher-king?
This week, we had a Heroes visit from Ron Feiner. He is a biologist (specifically a cancer researcher) at Memorial Sloan Kettering’s lab. He talked with us about his daily life as a medical researcher, about his career path to getting there, and answered our questions. We learned a lot from both his answers to our questions and his presentation.
Finally, on Friday, we had our end-of-session exhibition. We began with individual sharing of our portfolios and then moved on to demonstrations of various experiments. For the first time this year, Journey Studio learners opted to use the downstairs space during their exhibition. There, Soraya shared her biography, and Ava A., Ava G., and Katelyn shared their pitches. Finally, to end it all, we played Biology-Bee Jeopardy! The game was intense, with a 100-point tiebreaker near the end, but the Tigers won!
Overall, this session was super fun and interesting!
Lastly, I am sad to report that I will not be the newsletter writer for Session 5. Have fun on the break!