Inspire Citizens

A student-initiated service group is working in partnership with the school cafeteria to provide meals for a homeless shelter named Nanumi. Students helped to fundraise to supply the food, helped to organize a day in which they were able to help prepare the food and hot meals were delivered directly after they cooked it to the people at Nanumi.

High School Mandarin students were studying environmental advocacy and how to effectively advocate to community members. As a means to taking action, students decided that the best people to advocate to, were the younger generations; tomorrow’s leaders. Students used their Mandarin language skills and applied them by making differentiated learning resources for a younger Mandarin audience at the school. The personalized the resources to the interests language skills of the students and culminated their project in a group reading or sharing of their resources, and the younger students got to add these resources to their personal and class libraries afterwards.

Students in MYP Drama engaged in a brilliantly designed Theatre project in which they explored themes of oppression and injustice, identified what issues were oppressing them, and devised theatre pieces as action to inspire change in a target audience. Due to the virtual learning procedures they then used Zoom as a virtual media to do a virtual presentation for a live audience and to share with the SFS community.

Grade 9 Students use their knowledge, skills, and understandings from both Biology and Language and Literature to engage in an interdisciplinary Service as Action project. Teachers launch a provocation to students showing them that if we really do want to care about the well-being of our community, we are going to have to use our knowledge of biological systems to design actions, and that if we are to actually influence our community, we have to know how to effectively communicate and inspire them into action! In these pictures the students are experiencing a simulation of this whole process before using their content classes to design academic service learning projects by the end of the semester.

Grade 9 MYP Visual Arts students engaged in a deep provocation to launch their Print-Making unit. By exploring sustainability, well-being, and social justice issues that they cared deeply about, students were left with the question “What do you want others to see?. They were introduced to the idea that they would be creating prints for public display designed to draw others attention to issues in our local and global communities that need to be attended to and addressed and that their creative expression was a way to influence such pertinent dialogue and hopefully inspire action.

Students are engaging in a meditation activity to better connect with the environment, prime their senses for observation and investigation and attuning their minds to consider the impacts that their community gardens have had on self, community, and the world.