Action for Haiti

Grade 4 Hampstead students voted to use their current Unit of Inquiry to create action. Studying the central idea of how mass media can affect our perceptions and the choices we make, students were quick to see the link between this and the recent earthquake in Haiti.

Wanting to do something positive to help, students Ella, Erin, Andrea and Sarah explained the situation in Haiti to their classmates and discussed ways they could help. Grades 4-C and 4-H met together and decided to use the Southbank media to help them raise funds to help the Red Cross in Haiti by holding a bake sale.

The students researched information about Haiti for homework, including using maps to locate it. They researched ways they could use their knowledge of the media to create persuasive adverts or information posters to create awareness of the situation and persuade the Southbank community to support their cause. Now they are using data-handling skills to identify how many children are in the school and tally which kinds of cakes might sell best. Others have used data-handling skills to research magnitudes of earthquakes around the world to create a comparative bar-chart so that younger children can understand the information more easily. Additional tasks will include making adverts and speeches to inform and persuade.

The students have asked the whole community to help support their efforts.