Revel Recap: Welcome to Session 4!
Leaping into 2026!
Happy New Year, Rebels! We are so excited to welcome you back to the studios for Session 4! Here is a sneak preview of what we’ll be exploring over the next six weeks!
Important Upcoming Dates
Session 4 Exhibitions
Discovery Studio Exhibition - Tuesday, February 10th
Spark Studio Exhibition - Wednesday, February 11th
Exploration Studio Exhibition - Thursday, February 12th
Spark Studio
Quest
Over the next six weeks, our Quest theme will be Entrepreneurship. Learners will explore what it means to be an entrepreneur and how ideas can grow into real products or services. We will begin by learning the difference between goods (physical items that are made or sold) and services (actions or work done to help others). This will help learners recognize the different kinds of businesses they see in their everyday lives and inspire them as they begin thinking about business ideas of their own. As the Quest continues, learners will brainstorm business ideas and begin creating products to sell at our upcoming Exhibition. The Sparks will set prices, design logos, and explore marketing by creating pictures, signs, and advertisements for their businesses. We are excited to watch the Sparks grow into confident young entrepreneurs!
WORKSHOPS & Mystery reader
In our Math workshop, both groups will focus on money skills, including recognizing Canadian coins and bills, counting money, and understanding how money is used to buy and sell goods and services. We are also very excited to announce that our Mystery Reader tradition will return in the new year! Family members will be invited to sign up to visit the Spark Studio and read one or two picture books with the learners. Reading time will be from 3:30 to 3:50pm, and a sign-up sheet will be posted on BAND at the beginning of the Session. Feel free to bring one of your favourite picture books to share, or choose from a wide variety of books available at Revel. The day before your visit, you will need to send us three fun facts about yourself. These clues will be shared with the Rebels so they can try to guess who our Mystery Reader will be! This activity is always a fun surprise for the Sparks, and they love welcoming special guests into the studio. We can’t wait for your visit!
French
This session in French, the Sparks will focus on learning food-related words and actions through games, songs, role-play, and cooking! Learners will practice using French vocabulary while playing “grocery store” games, identifying fruits and vegetables, singing songs, and engaging in various colouring and hands-on activities. These tasks will help learners build their vocabulary and practice speaking in French in a playful and interactive way.
Outdoor Fun:
We are looking forward to more wintery weather ahead! We will contiunously check the forecast and let you know ahead of time on BAND when the Sparks will be heading to the tobogganing hill. All Rebels who participate in sledding must wear a helmet. Please also ensure your learner has a spare set of clothes and 2-3 extra pairs of socks to change into.
Show and Tell
During this session, learners may continue to bring one toy from home to share on Fridays. Toys must fit inside their bin.
Discovery Studio
Quest
How does the past determine the future? What can we learn about the present and future by studying how people lived in the past? If you were responsible for deciding the fate of a city, what evidence from the past would matter most? Welcome to… Shadows of the Acropolis! An immersive, story-driven Quest that invites learners to step into the role of secret spies in Ancient Greece. Through weekly challenges in geography, history, literature, drama, and the arts, learners investigate the strengths, values, government, politics and daily life of Athens and Sparta. They will read myths, analyze maps, create artifacts, perform Greek plays, and gather “intelligence” along the way to support their thinking. The culminating activity will play out in a dramatic grand debate at Exhibition, where learners must defend their evidence and decide which city the Persians should invade—ultimately determining the fate of Ancient Greece.
Reader Writer Workshops
Can stories, myths and traditions reveal what a society believes is most important? How does researching historical facts and details make our stories more powerful and believable? How can we use evidence from texts and research to create characters who feel authentic to Ancient Greece? In Session 4, Rebels will explore the fascinating world of Ancient Greece, focusing on the two most famous city-states: Athens and Sparta. Through reading, writing, research, and creative storytelling, learners will investigate what life was like thousands of years ago and compare how these two societies shaped their people, values, and daily routines. Learners will read Greek myths, analyze story elements, and use this understanding to write their own myth set in this ancient world. They will also take on the role of historians by researching authentic details about Ancient Greek life—such as clothing, roles, education, and traditions—to create an original character or mythical creature who could have lived in either Athens or Sparta.
Math Lab
To compliment our Quest, Rebels will engage in a series of ancient Math Labs! We’ll look to the Hindu-Arabic history of our everyday numerals, working with the numbers 1 to 1000 in Group 1 and 0.01 to 100 000 in Group 2. We’ll practice procedures for addition and subtraction of these numbers and explore an ancient Egyptian strategy for multiplication. Along the way, we’ll further develop our fact fluency, completing activities with different formats of multiplication grids. Of course, we couldn’t engage in ancient math without working with the Roman Numerals so we’ll take a detour mid-session and investigate this number system. In the second half of the session we will turn our attention to the beauty of geometry and meet some Greek mathematicians! For example, through the mathematical tale What’s your angle, Pythagoras? we’ll learn about a young hero who discovered some amazing mathematical relationships that we still use today!
French
In this French session, learners will explore restaurant and cooking vocabulary and verbs through games, role-play, and cooking activities. They will create menus, take and give orders, play food-themed games, and follow simple recipes, all while using French in real-life situations.
Exploration Studio
Quest
Why does hot sauce burn your tongue when its temperature is cool? Why does a baked cake rise? Why do some cookies end up being hard and crispy, and others warm and gooey? How do you cook that perfect steak or soufflé? Welcome to the Chemistry and Cooking Quest, where we will take on two worthy challenges: (1) Choosing a difficult dish to measure, combine and cook to perfection, and (2) Using your recipe and the dish you create as a springboard to explain the specific and general workings of atoms, elements, molecules and chemical reactions! We will dive into the foundational structure and simple mixtures found in chemistry. In both chemistry and cooking, the narrative is to start with simple building blocks, mixtures, and culinary techniques, and then gradually add complexity. After exploring elements and simple mixtures throughout Week 2, the studio will study the different types of chemical bonds and the impact that acidity or the lack thereof can have on a mixture. As learners move from acids and bases and simple mixtures into more complex reactions, there will be a deeper dive into the Periodic Table of elements, including research and competitions to see who can master the most knowledge on the most elements in the third week of the session. With mixtures, reactions, and the elements under their belts, it will be time for Rebels to develop a better understanding of balancing solutions and chemical equations. In Week 5, learners will focus on Chemistry as it relates to the senses and explore the nutritional breakdown of food. Along the way, they'll encounter cooking challenges, experiments, learn about scientific and culinary heroes, and debate ethical dilemmas! Will our chefs go down in flames, or rise to the occasion? Our Exhibition will be a must-see culinary event!
Math Lab
We'll return to a Thinking Classroom set up for Session 4's Math Lab. In small groups, learners will use whiteboards to work out their thinking and collaborate on low-floor, high-ceiling mathematical tasks. We will cover a variety of concepts, including least common multiples and greatest common factors, solving multi-step equations, graphing linear relations, function stories, and linear equations. Rebels will be required to make meaningful notes and verbally elaborate on their processes as they work through a series of increasingly complex problems.
Reader Writer Workshops
A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park is a novel based on the true story of Salva Dut, one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan," interweaving his harrowing journey as a refugee in 1985 with the story of Nya, a young girl in 2008, whose daily struggle to fetch water for her family highlights the ongoing challenges in South Sudan. In this session of Reader/Writer, we will read the novel independently while strengthening our annotation and literary note-taking skills. As a studio, we will meet to discuss the readings and delve deeper into the various themes of the novel, analyzing culture, gender, time, and place, while learning more about Sudan's Civil War through text-based evidence and comparing history with fiction. In our weekly Reader/Writer core skills work, we will continue to practice writing expository, descriptive, narrative, and persuasive pieces. We will also explore mood, tone, story elements, figurative language, and foreshadowing during our weekly reading challenges. In our grammar sessions, we will review run-on sentences, fragments, misplaced modifiers, who vs. whom, and dangling modifiers.
French
In this session, in French, learners will focus on French vocabulary and verbs related to food with a restaurant theme. Learners will create menus, answer questions about the menu, play food-themed guessing games, and practice taking orders as if they were working in a restaurant. They will also practice using negation, the future tense, and polite expressions while speaking.
Big History
In Big History, we will conclude with the evolution of life, before moving on to discover the superpower that helped our earliest ancestors thrive like no other species: collective learning. We will be studying human ancestors, migration, and foraging societies over the next six weeks.
Financial Literacy
Now that we've learned about budgeting in our Personal Finance lessons, it is time to learn about investing! We will begin by learning about stocks, ticker symbols, various stock markets, and the reasons behind investing. We will also cover topics such as inflation, understanding quotes, ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, and the basics of price movements and the business cycle. Alex Anderson, CFA, Senior Portfolio Manager at Ottawa Wealth Advisory Group, will join us to answer learner questions and discuss building a diversified portfolio, investing objectives and planning, and investment strategies. To make it more realistic and provide practice, Rebels will also participate in a stock game simulation, where they will trade, research, and build an online portfolio.