A while ago I posted about my Design Starters. I start (almost) every design lesson with a mystery object on the board. Students have to come up with questions and guesses for what it might be. There is no emphasis on getting the answer right - in fact, I encourage the weird and wild ideas - many of the suggestions the students have would be great products themselves! Students have a lot of fun doing this and it is a great way to kick off the lesson. (Also I always great students at the door and usually have a music video playing as they come in).
Instead of adding and adding and adding to one slide deck, I've created a second one (the slide decks get a bit slow with too much info on it)

Here's part two!

I pulled all the resources from the partially complete unit planners (PCUPs) for the May 2020 MYP exams. The shared global context is "Globalisation and Sustainability". Here's the spreadsheet with all resources.
I also put together a slide deck, with all the videos from the PCUP resource list. My students will use this in advisory. I didn't put the PHE or Language Acquisition Emergent videos on the slide deck, as their theme/focus is quite different. Our Grade 10s will use this slide deck in homeroom/advisory classes.

Wednesday is World Children's Day. My Grade 7s and 8s will be doing activities in their homerooms. Both have different activities. Grade 7 is more general and Grade 8 is focussed on sports.

Enjoy! Let me know if you use them or what you do at your schools

Tomorrow is World Toilet Day! Here's an activity my Grade 9s will be doing in homeroom on Wednesday.

I'll be hosting #MYPChat on Twitter again this week. Last time my focus was international mindedness, but this time I'm focussing on interdisciplinary units.

Join in on `Twitter, or add your thought is the comments on this post.

It's not even 8.30am in Atlanta, and my old MYPC, Carmen Samanes, and me just wrote the skeleton for a unit. We work well together, have similar ideas and collaborating with her is a joy. We also work fast when we work together! The following unit is for Spanish Language Acquisition - the slideshow and information shared below is mostly in English, but would be translated into Spanish before using with the students.
​The following unit was inspired by 'Sneaky Cards'. This are cards which have prompts for activities on them, (almost like 'dares'). When you have done the activity, the card is passed on to the next person. 

We were originally thinking of doing these about every attribute of the IB Learner Profile, but decided to focus the whole unit on the IB Learner Profile trait of Caring!

The students will warm up by writing an anonymous postcard to someone in their community - with maybe a compliment of a quote about happiness on them. To have students generate ideas, we get them to think about the following questions:

• What are school appropriate acts of kindness?
• Who in our school community can we support?
• Who in our school community understands Spanish?
• Who in our school community do we not often interact with?
• What are moments of stress in our school community?
• Think about the different types of rooms in the school - are there any cards which could work in different spaces?

After this activity, they will move onto making 'school sneaky cards'

At the end students will use the following Spanish Proverbs and inquiry questions for reflection!

This unit is not complete, and just came out of a conversation last week, and then half an hour this morning, so please feel free to give feedback.
I wanted to share our unit overview ideas - though this might change later. As well as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which fits in nicely with our Global Context and Key and Related Concepts!

Although this is for a small, phase 4 Spanish class in Atlanta, I might do a short version of this with my Design students, in Stuttgart, later in the year too! Here's a link to our work so far, and below is the full presentation.

I originally created a translation spreadsheet for all my EAL students, but this year I shared it with everyone. It is a Google Sheet which automatically translates words from English into a variety of languages. I share this through Google Classroom, so every student gets their own copy, and they can delete the columns that are not useful to them. I also discuss how reliable this spreadsheet is (or isn't), and remind students that it might not be 100% accurate! 

Here's the link - feel free to make a copy.
Here's a video explaining how it works.