Choosing our 'first' to research

• On Friday (3 August 2018) we worked in groups to write lots of questions about "firsts." Even if you were away (as lots of you were), the big pink sheets at the front of the room will help you to catch up.  Each group wrote questions and came up with a fantastic range of questions that are definitely worth researching.
• The idea is that we ask a question about a 'first' that we don't already know about, and then when we research that question, we will uncover information that isn't widely available.  
• That was what the film Hidden Figures did to tell the stories of super talented mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.  The huge contribution they made to aeronautical research was hidden from public knowledge for a long time.

Task one:
Take a pink sheet from the front of the room, and add the questions to the padlet below.  As you are writing the questions on the padlet, add more questions that you think of.  If you don't have a pink sheet at your table, add your own questions as you think of them.  I have put some examples up to get you started.

Task two:
Choose one question which you would like to research.  Write your name in a comment on the question you have chosen. Create a new document in your English folder called "Researching Firsts"  In that document, write your question at the top and then write about why you have chosen it, including as many details about the topic and its wider significance as you can. I have made an example below:

"Who invented the flush toilet?"  

I chose this topic because I was thinking about items which we don't talk about much but which make our lives much more comfortable.  I've read before about how people had to go outside to a long drop 100 years ago and thought about how cold that would be at night.  I would like to understand what science led to the invention of the flush toilet and how fast the use of the flush toilet spread.  I think this is an important topic because getting rid of our human poo and urine safely is really important for preventing disease.

Creating 'firsts' questions

Learning objective: to identify other "hidden figures" in history and in the present
Success criteria:
1. We can identify questions to help us find out about firsts.
2. We can share the ideas from our group's work with the rest of the class
3. We can reflect on which area is of most interest for each of us to focus our research on.

We choose to go to the moon

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

John F Kennedy, full speech here.

What can we learn from this speech about JFK's vision for the United States of America?

How can we put this idea into our own lives?  What is hard for us but worth doing to stretch ourselves?

Hidden Figures: the big question

1. What evidence do you see in the film of racism?
2. Why do you think that coloured people were treated so differently and so badly?