Thursday, November 17, 2011

 In preparation for the upcoming Parent Conferences, the students are continuing to work through their self-assessments of the Learning Skills.  These should be ready and available for you to see during your interview time on Thursday or Friday.  Most of the class, as I have probably mentioned, are understanding what it means to develop an action plan to make there goal come true.  The challenge will be in remembering what to do on a day to day basis.  To assist them, I think I will type out their goal and action plan for each Learning Skill and have them place it on their desk so they can see it.  I will not get around to doing this until after the interviews on Friday, November 18.

A useful link to a file from the York Region District School Board may shed some light on the importance of these Learning Skills.  I believe these skills are just as important as any academic skill I will teach to your son or daughter in their two years with me.  http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/pdfs/w/schools/LearningSkillsandWorkHabitsBrochure.pdf

Small groups were formed to begin a more intensive and collaborative effort at Reading Comprehension.  A number of students feel intimidated by getting information from an article so I decided to try a group approach to dealing with the anxiety.  Using the current events news publication that I have mentioned before, What in the World, the group returned to the article an Moammar Gadhafi.  The students were in small groups and assigned the same set of questions.  Here are some of the group answers on chart paper.  Because I am trying to get everyone in the habit of writing in full, complete sentences, that was something I was looking for in all of the answers.

As you can see, some of the groups wrote answers in sentences and some did not.  We reviewed the answers from the section of the publication as well as some answers I wrote.  This was an example of modelling both for Reading and Writing in terms of comprehending the passage as well as communicating effectively with complete thoughts and ideas.

The class now has another reading passage that they will work on on their own concerning the Occupy movements which have been taking place around the world.  There are some abstract and new ideas in the article and I will take it step by step in order to break it down.  The article was read in class and a Reading Response was assigned for last night (November  16).  I will assess these and then break the class into groups where they will become experts on a small section of the article.  In addition to this, they will view some news clips to supplement their understanding of the material.  All of this will be done prior to any form of evaluation.

By the end of the day, all of the Drama groups should be complete in having a rehearsal time in front of the class.  Each group was provided with detailed feedback about how they could improve their performances.  The feedback involved reminders to the group about the Historical Concepts we have been discussing.  These concepts are being extended to discussions we are having about the late Moammar  Gadhafi and the upcoming discussions around the Occupy movements.  I managed to film three of the groups rehearsing and  I will attempt to upload the videos.  If they are not present on the blog, it means that I ran into some technical challenges.  I will look into these challenges and see if I can solve them.