Educational Reflections (formerly Rumblings from 52): Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

The time between my last post and this post is due to the volume of work I have been coping with and the many activities which take up a lot of time at this particular time of year.

I was out at the West Conference qualifying Track and Field meet at Centennial Stadium in Etobicoke. Jack, from Room 52, was to attend, but did not arrive early enough to catch the school bus to the facility. We will be heading out tomorrow afternoon for a trip to Oakwood Collegiate to watch some members of the Arts program perform for us.

In turns of trips to high schools, I was out at Heydon Park last week to discuss some course options for three of our students and with a couple of students at Central Tech 2 weeks ago.

photo not taken by me (http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/heydonpark/pages/principals_message.htm)

Group Shot (Mr. Rodriguez [Guidance] is beside Mr. Proudfoot)

Jack and George taking in some intense information about the available supports at Central Tech

Awards won by the school.

This photos showcases some of the brilliant technology programs offered at CTS. These 2 boys recaptured a title in an automotive competition that CTS one had.

The project we did back in February in our class with our Strengths and Struggles was showcased as part of a presentation at the TDSB Futures conference last week down at the Automotive Centre at the CNE. I attended the conference for 1day, along with three other students, to showcase the different equitable and inclusive activities taking place at AMG.

To the left of the presentation board was the laptop with the video of members of Room 52 talking about their "Strengths and Struggles".

The Family Nutrition and Fitness night happened at AMG. Many of the teachers on staff created healthy delights from the book called Bake it Up! http://www.nutritionrc.ca/resources/pdfs/nrc_bake-it-up.pdf
Mr. Moye and Steven Moniz, a former AMG student and current fitness instructor, took the students and parents through some exercises. I did not take many photos but here is one that turned out okay when I wasn't breathing hard.

The Junior Achievement Program http://www.jacan.org/ visited our class. I think the particular program was not as effective as it could have been. I think the ideas were a little too abstract. I have had experience with this program before and saw a more pragmatic approach to talking about money and the importance of staying in school. The program we had was very bank and investor based. The students seemed to enjoy themselves during the program activities, though.

We will bringing our unit of study in Geometry to a close shortly. Yesterday, there was a short quiz on plotting points on the 4 quadrants. We did a review on the overhead to guide the students. I had the students hand in game charts with the location of the ships and made corrections for them. They were allowed to study this before the quiz.

In Geography we spent some time looking at the concepts of movement and place. I used some images from the Internet to illustrate how the Leslie Street Spit, when frozen, allows the movement of animals from the Toronto Islands to the spit. I learned that from a trip to the Island School. Here a few images:

Some information about the spit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Street_Spit

summer

winter

The Strength Based Resilient project turned a corner and started looking at the issue of building and understanding character strengths.

This discussion led into the homework from last weekend where a parent or guardian filled in the top 5 character strengths. Thanks for doing this.

The idea of understanding these strengths, as I mentioned in an earlier blog posting, was that character, especially character strengths, have to be nutured. About three weeks ago we did an exercise that talked about the importance of keeping a garden healthy. I photographed some of those before and after photos and then pulled from the class what things would be good to keep a garden healthy.