April 2, 2012

Many of the class members completed their stories of Resilience as part of the initial activity of the SBR program.  Many students did not complete the work and have to do it for homework tonight.  I will be checking them and providing the class with some comments in order to direct and encourage their thinking.

I shared my story with them this morning:

 We returned to our paragraphing exercise today and worked on developing the three "body" sentences of the paragraph.  The writing we are doing now resembles a hamburger:

 The students used the topic sentence they developed last week as the guide for this exercise.  I used an example from my paragraph to model this activity for the class.  This was up on the board for them to see along with a sample of video I have used in previous years to explain the basic parts of a paragraph:

On Friday, we began our new Math unit by playing a game called Gridlock.  It introduced the students to the basics of locating coordinates on a grid.   Here are some photos of the class playing:

  Some of the students will be doing this work using the first quadrant of the Cartesian gird (dealing with only positive numbers) and some of the other students will be dealing with numbers that are integers (e.g., +2, -2) and other portions of the grid. The top right portion is the first quadrant and runs counter-clockwise up to four.

I forgot to add that we shared a little bit about Earth Hour.  Some members of the class participated in the event and we discovered why turning off lights is such an important thing.

The sources for electricity for Toronto come of a variety of sources. Here is a list I found on the Internet from The University of Guelph:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~whulet/OGN/Vol1Issue1/Glen_Estill.htm

The Toronto Star had some great photos from the night.  http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1154841--earth-hour-toronto-2012-power-use-down-6-8?bn=1 The city was not close to the all time low conservation of 15% on electricity from back in 2009.  I found a blog with some nice images:  http://www.blogto.com/environment/2011/03/earth_hour_2011_in_toronto_the_worst_yet/

I am sure if you do some searches around the web, you will come across some really interesting images of the night.

HOMEWORK:  Grade 8 high school forms; completed Resilience stories; forms for camp -- Grade 8s only + $65 due on Thursday 

Michael Pham drops in for a visit.  He is now in Grade 9.