Our grade 11 English class began our creative writing unit by reading excerpts of Tara Westover’s Educated. In small groups, we shared our thoughts on the text, then created maps that showed our thought processes. Our understanding of the craft moves the author used will help us when we go on to write our own scenes next week.

With exams finished, our grade 11 class headed off to Camp Pine Crest for four days of winter fun. Snowshoeing, skiing, and stargazing were among the many activities that filled our time at camp. We even had the opportunity to brave the cold and sleep in quinzees we built out of snow. To finish up our trip, we held a …

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Do you like reading about ballet? How about mystery? To end off a semester of English, we are presenting seminars on a variety of short stories which encapsulated themes of power and blindness. One of the stories we read was Heather O’Neill’s Swan Lake for Beginners, which details a fictional experiment that cloned a world-renowned ballet dancer.

Another day, another lab! For our last practice lab before the grade 11 chemistry summative, we combined a solution of copper sulfate with iron. Using knowledge from many of our previous chemistry units, we found the limiting reagent and compared the moles of the elements to determine the valence of copper.

After a month of planning and designing, we finally presented our Rube Goldberg machines in grade 12 physics. Our machines are designed to perform simple tasks in intricate ways consisting of multiple steps and energy transfers. Examples of tasks our machines performed include cutting hair and ripping toilet paper.

After 4 long months of limits, derivatives, and integrals, it seems like calculus can solve just about anything. We started our final unit—applications of integration—by using our prior integration knowledge to calculate the area bounded by multiple functions. We will start with differential equations and revolutions in the upcoming year.