Stop Cuts To Home Learners by Sophia Pallister

This is the speech I made to the Vancouver School Board trustees on April 12, 2016.

Good evening, members of the School Board, thank you for allowing me to speak to you tonight. My name is Sophia Pallister and I would like to speak to you addressing the proposed cuts to the Staffing of the Home Learners Program.

I am 11 years old. I am in Grade 6 of the Home Learners program and I have been in Home Learners since I was old enough to get an education. I started in kindergarten in Home Learners with Shannon Hobson, (the teacher who founded the HL program) as my teacher, the year after the program was founded. She has been my teacher now for 7 years. Ms. Juliana Lee has been my teacher for 6 years, so other than Ms. Hobson, I am the person who has been in the Vancouver Home Learners program the longest!

I like having close relations to my friends. In Home Learners we are more like a family than I think a regular class would be. My understanding is that the proposed budget cuts would allow for only one of our two teachers to continue. At this point I find that news very upsetting. It's really nice knowing your teachers and having the same teachers over, and over, and over.

Our two teachers are very different from each other and they collaborate together really well. Since we have a more flexible schedule we feel more flexible which means sometimes we get out of hand and I don't think that one teacher could manage all of us for an entire academic year!

At Home Learners you're not just learning what you're learning in school, you're also learning at home, so that means every single member of the class has an entirely personalized learning plan. In a regular classroom, the teacher prepares one single curriculum for the entire class, and that works because everyone's the same age and grade, however in our classroom alone, the teacher has to work on 5 different grade levels and curriculum.  If you ask a teacher how difficult it is to think of one big curriculum for a whole class, multiply that by 38! Our teachers also have to manage all the different allotment money requests for the 16 students in my class that meets on Tues & Thurs, plus the 22 students in the primary class that meets 2 other days a week, and I think that's too much work for only one person to handle.

I want to also tell you what a valuable program Home Learners is, and how special I think it is. I think it is one of the best programs the Vancouver School Board has, so I think you should be doing things to make it stronger, not make it weaker. Taking away one of our teachers would mean we might to have to shorten our school days, which means less learning opportunities. 

One of the best things about HL is that it is a mixed age class. Being in a mixed age class has been good because differences don't stand out as much, because everyone is different. That decreases the potential of bullying and members of the classroom start judging people less on their age and more by their abilities and potential, and more negative differences start to disappear.  When I was in kindergarten I was very tall and I was advanced for my age, but because I was in a mixed age class, I could do more advanced learning. Right now, there's one person in my class who struggles in certain subjects, and sometimes he goes around the class and gets inspiration or asks for help from other people. In a normal classroom situation that would be called cheating. In Home Learners, and to quote Sir Ken Robinson, in the rest of the world, it's called collaboration. 

In Home Learners, we also have the ability to choose what kinds of schooling and topics we do at home, within the given curriculum. It sort of teaches you the art of Creative Learning, and then you catch on and continue doing it all the time. You start to learn on your own. Creative Learning requires creative teaching and sometimes it's hard to think outside the lines that you were taught in, which is why it requires collaboration, which is why I strongly suggest you allocate the money to allow two teachers to continue to collaborate, as they have done so beautifully to foster this program to be the best it can be.

I strongly urge you to discontinue the cuts to this program. 

Thank you for your time. Good night.

A "POWER"ful Field Trip by Sophia, Eleanor and Miranda

 Two weeks ago we (Sophia, Eleanor and Miranda) went to the Stave Lake Visitors Centre (SLVC). The SLVC is the place where we can learn about BC Hydro and the dam and the power that is made there. This power goes into our homes and powers our lives, like this computer we're writing this report on and like the computer you're probably reading this on!

We loved this field trip because of our time outdoors. We went to Hopcott's the best place ever, and we got stuff to have an amazing picnic with, including macaroons and pate and goat cheese. It was a beautiful day and we liked the field trip and the picnic.

At the SLVC, one of our favourite things was the Electrica room, a room with lots of exhibits about electricity and places it comes from. One exhibit we liked there taught us what NOT to do at downed power line. 

You have to keep your feet on the ground and shuffle if you ever are at a downed power line, and this is because if you take a full step the electrons go up one leg and travel through your whole body and make your whole body an electric circuit and you will be electrocuted!

Miranda: There were lots of exhibits about renewable resources. Renewable resources are resources that can used again, like wind power, solar power, geothermal power and hydro power. Hydro is using water, and that is the kind of dam we went to, where the movement of water creates energy which is turned into power.

One of my favourite exhibits was a machine that shows how energy sparks work. When you pull back two balls and let go of them, it shoots energy through a line of balls and the energy goes through to the last ball and the last ball hits a switch that turns on a light. This shows how potential energy turns into kinetic energy!

Sophia: I liked learning about Nikola Tesla and how he wanted to make free energy.  

The Story of Nikola Tesla

Once upon a time when light bulbs weren't very popular, there was a man named Nikola Tesla. He was trying to invent ways to use electricity. He had a couple of people who were giving money to help him do his experiments. They thought to themselves, "When he gets electricity, we'll make people pay for it AND GET A BUNCH OF MONEY!" Nikola believed he could harness energy from the earth and make free energy for everyone. When the people who were giving him money for experiments found out he wanted to give electricity away for free, they aid, "No way we're going give money for that, dude!" and they stopped giving money for experiments which is why we don't free electricity today.

The End

The picture above is a model of a Tesla coil we saw demonstrated when we were there. I think the tesla coil releases electrons though the air, and jumped on to the light bulbs, because the light bulbs lit up.

Eleanor: When I was at the SLVC I was focussing on STRUCTURES. One of my favourite structures there was a big, big, structure that looked like a waterslide. If you stacked three men on top of each other, that would be how tall and wide it is. They are called comstocks, they were used for taking the water from the lake and putting into the power station. 

Sophia: The water would come into the turbines, which look like huge water wheels, and they would send the turbines around, and the outer wall of the turbine would have magnetic lining and because of the magnetic lining, the electrons would jump around all thingy wingy all over the place and make ELECTRICITY! This is an awesome example of how potential energy turns into kinetic energy.

We learned about the history of building the dam, and that there was a whole town that was built when they built the dam. Only men would work on building the dam, but because the dam was being built in the middle of nowhere, they made a whole town for the men and their families, and they tried to make it as friendly as possible. There was no alcohol allowed, they made a bank, a church and a school, there were shops, and the world's shortest railroad - like a skytrain - between the dam and the town.

People thought electricity was scary when it was first invented - like witchcraft! We love how on this old ad it says "Safe! Children can turn the switch!"

It was really cool getting to go to the SLVC. We sure gained some "POWERful" knowledge! 

Thanks for reading, and see you on Tuesday for bowling. Cara, bring me my mangoes!

You Can't Putt With Fire Balls

This is the fire that happened right by my house today.

There was a fire at the old abandoned golf course on Hastings St near my house today, right by the shops. There was a gas station right beside where the fire was and if you had looked out my living room window at the time of the fire, we could have seen the flames from our house.  CBC News reported that the flames were thirty meters high. That's about four of my houses stacked on top of each other.

When you look out our window you can see the nets from the golf course, and you could have probably seen the flames. This map shows you how close my house is to the fire. 

This shot below from Google earth shows some interesting and KIND OF SCARY things! The blue dot on the picture is my house. The red marker shows where the fire was. You can see that just north of where the fire is a bunch of round tanks and that is where oil is stored, and right on the bottom left corner by the golf ctr is a gas station. If that fire spread any more the fire could have gone to the gas station or to the oil and if it went to the gas station and the oil there would have been a big explosion (WHICH WOULD BE COOL ON A VIDEO BUT NOT IN REAL LIFE.)

This is a picture below we took this morning and you can see here there is a fire truck and if you look at the white van and just look up a little bit you can see a man on the ladder thingy of a fire truck spraying with a giant hose. We learned they had to keep doing that even after the flames were out to make sure all of the hot spots were not hot.

This is me climbing a cherry tree outside the golf course and winning the cutest person ever award, my 5,788,888,621st one.  

So far, I, Eleanor have been talking and now I will pass the beautiful talking sceptre to Sophia, which I am very sad about doing.

Thank you, Eleanor. After we got told off for climbing the cherry blossom tree, some police women came outside the gate to find out why the security guard at the oil storage place was yelling at us. After we explained that we are NT criminals, we interviewed the officers with some questions about the fire. *Please note that the Q&A below is based on my memory of the interview. This is not the actual conversation.

Q: What is your job as policewomen?

A: We work for the RCMP in a department that investigates frauds. Frauds are when someone lies or makes up something fake to get money that is not theirs. We also investigate arson. Arson is when someone sets a fire on purpose, probably to get money out of insurance.

Q:What do you look for in a scene like this?

A: In cases like this one, we might start by looking for where the fire started, like the origin of the fire. We might look to see if the fire started in the middle of the room, and if there were any accelerants, like gas. We might also look for a gas can. We also have a machine that could search for traces of gas.

Q: What do you know from the investigation so far?

A: Since the fire was so hot, it looks like a suspicious fire, possibly arson. Unfortunately, it's not safe for us to go inside the actual building yet.

Q: I noticed the gas station back there, I was wondering if someone could have bought a lighter from there to start the fire.

A: Yes, it's highly probable, they might has also filled a jerry can with gas there to act as an accelerant, so we'll be looking  at the closed circuit TV from the gas station to see if we can find any possible suspects.

Sophia's moral of the story: "Don't play with matches around abandoned, wood framed golf courses".

Eleanor's moral of the story (after meeting the RCMP fraud investigators): "Women can do anything!"