Tuesday, April 24, 2012

I have not been feeling as peppy as lately and that probably speaks to why I have not posted over the past several days.  Gosh, it has almost been a week!

First and foremost, I wanted to say Happy First birthday to the blog (April 18, 2011).  That was the day when I started adding regular additions to it.

As the deadline for the Health project approaches, I felt it was important to review with the class how to take jot notes. As outlined on an earlier blog posting, this project has 2 main areas of focus:  what the drug is and what it does to the body.  So, research needs only to be focused on these area.  As a group, we looked at the issue of DDT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT), how it was used to treat Malaria, and the consequences of using this drug.  First you will see the passage, a graphic illustration of the passage, and the jot notes we took from the article.

Since the Health project is to be written in 3 paragraphs, I have been providing many examples of how they can be set up.  Mrs. Machado and I have glanced at some of the rough copies of the exercise and see that some students are writing in correct paragraph format.

Lia proposed that she would do her project on the drug Crystal Meth.  I do not know anything about it but went ahead and created a "sample" essay, using a topic and concluding sentence for each paragraph, and wrote on the board.  Tomorrow, I will create a checklist for the students to assess their writing to see if they are following the expectations of the project.  I think it is very important that they get a sense of what is expected of them so they can become more involved and active in the assignment.  I think it is important that the students be able to do some peer editing.  I am going to, gently, try doing this once this Health project is done.  I use the word gently because some students can be very protective or uncomfortable having their peers check their work.

The only thing that was left out were the supporting details.











Today (Tuesday) was a short quiz in Geometry on plotting point on a coordinate grid.  As a lead up and review to the quiz, we played a game of Battleship last week.  The students worked very good together.

Kathy Macina Ciardullo, Special Education Coordinator for our Family of Schools, dropped by to see how we were doing in relation to our Strength Based Resilience (SBR) work.  We had 2 interesting activities where the students had to write one of their core values around a stick figure, which represented out classroom. 

Along with that, the students worked in small groups to create an image of a garden, first, full of weeks and dead plants, and, then, a healthy looking garden.  Not all of the groups created before and after images and I will be sure to take a photo of them.  The idea behind this exercise is in recognizing that creating a healthy garden requires effort, support, and a conscious choice to place healthy things in it (soil, manure, fertilizer).  Similarly, a healthy and resilient mind will require the addition of generative and positive things.  This portion of the SBR training will now shift towards the idea of identifying character strengths and exercises to build and support the resilient self.  Here are some images of the gardeners at work

The last set of images are from the Community Clean Up day on Friday.  Back in April 2011, that I began the blog with images of that same community initiative (http://rumblingsfrom52.blogspot.ca/2011_04_01_archive.html). 

There will not be any homework tonight.