Friday, April 13, 2012

This coming Tuesday, we will be travelling to Roy Thompson Hall to watch the Toronto Symphony Orchestra perform from The Hockey Sweater by Sheldon Cohen.  The film is available for review at the NFB (National Film Board) website:  http://www.nfb.ca/film/sweater
Here is a picture of Mr. McLaughlin showing a copy of the book to the class.  (Sorry about your hand being on your nose.)

I downloaded a study guide from the TSO and will spend some more time talking about the performance and significance of the book before we go out on Tuesday afternoon.

We spent Thursday working on closing out the complete rough drafts of our narrative paragraphs.  The students added a concluding sentence but they did this after playing a paragraph matching game.  As a review, the students worked in groups to match topic sentences to the "body" sentences of a paragraph.  Here are some images of the class playing:

This game took us into the afternoon and the students -- with their minds filled with great ideas about writing -- returned to their paragraphs.  I reminded them of what they were doing and even did some modelling of what a 5 sentence paragraph could look like. It was my attempt to be explicit as possible and making a point of repeating the information over and over.

 

In attempting to develop a concluding sentence, I wanted the class to see the connection between the Topic and Concluding sentence. I used the following example to show how they are worded different but have the same spirit or intention:

We will return to another game next week and spend some time in the Library working on the final drafts of the assignment.  I plan to tie this exercise of writing paragraphs to the Health project they have.  I have changed the expectations from what Mr. Moye wanted so the students will end up writing 3 paragraphs based on this outline:

Each paragraph will be on a specific topic.  I will talk more about this on Monday, but this may help some of the students who are not sure how to proceed on this assignment.  We will also be going into the Library on Monday for a period for some research.

One thing that has been interesting about this Resilience based work is trying to find opportunities to showcase it in everyday events.  Fortunately, a number of the students do not often see how they get stuck in a lot of thinking short cuts (the homework from Wednesday and Thursday).  I have an image to share and I will comment a little about the conversation we had around it.

 This picture is mean to represent tunnel thinking.  In other words, you can only see what is inside of the tunnel and not what surrounds it.  For example, if a student got 8/10 on a Math test, he or she may be angry for not getting perfect.  What they may not notice or understand is that they only got two questions wrong!  Perhaps, if they were looking for a higher grade, they may have had to ask for some help or do some more reviewing.  By no means do I think that perfection is the key or should be the goal, but I have noticed that many students strive for perfection and end up frustrating themselves when it does not happen.

So, I have been gently reminding students to pay attention to some of the thoughts they have when they make comments that are negative or self-deprecating.  By stopping the class to see or get a sense of how the words they say can structure their ideas, thoughts, and actions, it develops a sense of meta-cognition.  They are beginning to think about how they think.  To be continued.

There is some Geometry homework this weekend relating to locating coordinates on a grid.  We reviewed today what a row and a column are and what comes first when we are trying to locate a coordinate on a grid.  We will review this concept on Monday with a game which mimics the classic game Battleship.

column, row [in an ordered pair]

 Enjoy the weekend.
Homework:  return forms and TTC fare for TSO, complete coordinate grid HW, Camp Kawartha forms or money, last 4 items of "Thinking Shortcut" work from p. 9 or the SBR workbook.
HEALTH PROJECT DUE APRIL 27TH