New complementary courses at Margaret Wooding School successful

Southern Alberta Newspapers Submitted Photo. NEW COURSES: Students at Margaret Wooding School in Redcliff engage in complementary courses, a new program brought in this year. During the first term, Grade 4 took Life Skills, Grade 5 VEX Robotics and Grade 6 STEM.

By Samantha Johnson
Prairie Rose Public Schools Content Writer

This year, Margaret Wooding School started a program of complementary courses divided into three themes: fine arts, lifestyle and leisure, along with tech/STEM. There are three terms every year and students participate in one complementary course each term from a different category.

“After our school review last year, we looked at how we wanted to offer our complementary course program based on feedback from parents,” explained Principal Craig Corsie. “We used that information to design courses that we provide at each grade level. It’s been successful and a bit of a change from how we did it before, but the students have really gotten into the courses we’ve been offering. Each week presents a new challenge and opportunity for students and its great seeing the kids engaged, smiling and working together on their different tasks.”

The first term of complementary courses finished recently, with Grade 4 students taking Life Skills, which was designed to help foster independence, leadership, cooperation and organization through a variety of different activities and challenges. Guest speakers come in and help introduce students to broader concepts and connect the learning to real life.

Olivia talked about how they played board games, such as Monopoly and that she is good with money. “Speaking about money,” she said, “we had a class on how to handle money. A banker came in, she talked to us about bank accounts and stuff like that.”

Her friend Jordan added, “we did a home alone course, virtual reality all around the world, learning about the Great Wall of China and other places. In home alone, we learnt about fires, if somebody broke in, if you choke, if you start bleeding and who you should contact.”

Grade 5 students had VEX Robotics to learn about engineering, design, robotics and coding to construct and program their own robot. Students work through a construction phase and then learn how to create commands to have the robot carry out a variety of functions.

Both Tommy and Jagger said their favourite parts of the course was making an extended grabber. We built it out of pieces supplied by Mr. Buckle and followed instructions,” said Tommy, who added most of the content in the course was new to him. Jagger’s dad is a mechanic and often works in the garage with him. “I know how to build lots of stuff, mostly with wood and metal.”

In the Grade 6 class, students worked together in groups to tackle cooperative engineering challenges in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) course. The course is designed to teach teamwork, leadership, design thinking and creativity as students analyze challenges and determine the most effective ways to complete the task. There is a competitive nature to each task, which students found made the tasks more enjoyable.

Deegan and Maddie explained how one of the tasks was to build a table out of newspapers and tape. The students had to be able to put their hand under the table when it was completed and the competition was to see which one lasted the longest when books were placed on top, with Deegan’s group winning the competition.

“That’s what’s we normally do in STEM, is have a competition,” stated Deegan. “It was fun, especially hanging out with the people in the group. We rolled the newspapers, crossed them over each other and kept going. I learned you have to use teamwork and that you can’t be getting down on your team and you have to be positive.”

Maddie added, “everyone builds their thing and we’ll have a test and whoever gets the longest or survives the longest wins. My favourite part was when we worked in groups together on challenges, such as the paper chains. Everybody got in groups of three or four and had a big sheet of paper and they had to figure out how to make the longest chain with it. Some did tiny hoops and others did big hoops. You had to have a strategy to figure out how to make yours the longest and beat the other groups.”