The First Great Lesson

This week, we followed the story of The Coming of the Universe, the first Great Lesson in the Elementary curriculum. This is a half day immersive experience which weaves a story together with thirty demonstrations of the natural properties and laws. The story takes us from the instant of the Big Bang right up to the algae mats that formed the foundation of life in the Precambrian era. Along the way, we witness gravity, relativity and attraction, magnetism, solutions, star formations, consequences of rotation around the sun, the water cycle, atomic structure and the periodic table of elements, rocks and crystals, erosion, tectonic movement, layers of the earth and atmosphere, volcanoes, land and water forms, the stars and planets, thermodynamics and states of matter.

Highlights this year included the unveiling of the new River Project which will guide the Lower through Upper Elementary curriculum and an exploration of the relative distance between the planets that saw us count of 777 steps from Dovercourt all the way to Shaw Street.

In January, the second Great Lesson, the Coming of Life, will be presented.