Tuesday, June 5, 2012

It is hard to believe it is almost the end of the school year.
Report Cards will be going home on Monday, June 25.
The Camp Kawartha trip for the Grade 8s will be on Wednesday through Thursday of next week.  The remaining students will be assisting the Primary teachers in some end of year work and teaching while I am away with the majority of the Grade 8 group.

Thanks to the efforts of the students from Room 52, who helped with the Waste Audit, our school was given a Bronze rating by the Ecoschool program which helps to promote environmental awareness in Ontario schools.

We had a quiz on some of the initial concepts we learned in Probability yesterday.  At the time of typing this entry, I have not marked them but I will and have them returned to the students by tomorrow.  Before yesterday's quiz, we did some review of the major concepts and ideas we looked at:

Some brainstorming done by the class from a SMARTBoard lesson.

A posted chart often referring to the common vocabulary used in Probability

One thing that makes the whole idea of Probability exciting is how it may relate to weather.  Take an example of a home page from last week's weather for Toronto:

Each day provides a percentage of the Probability of precipitation

The unit on the Titanic continued.  I may have mentioned this in a post, but this exercise took the skills of reading and recording 15 important words from the article on the Titanic, cutting them out and then placing them in a logical order to create a summary of the article.

To get them thinking about the Titanic, I went back to some of the questions the different pairings of students came up with from the KWL charts from a couple of weeks ago:

I pulled out a chart board of how to frame questions.

  We used this when we were doing the Health project in the Winter.  I invited students to give some examples of how we could ask higher level type questions (Level 3 or 4).  I did not record any of the responses but wanted to see if they could do it.  I may do a more formal assessment of this skill another time.

  Returning to the summary type activity, here are some images of the process:

Instructions

I will take some more photos showing the completed project.  Each paper was illustrated of an image related to the Titanic.

A large portion of the afternoon was devoted to our guests who came in from Community Living Toronto to promote a game they have called Spinclusion.

I took up the offer to try out the program.  The Grade 4 class, under Mr. McLaughlin, took part in the Elementary portion of the program.  It is my intention to have the program available to most of the school next year as we continue to discuss learning differences and building a sense of inclusion at AMG.  I hope the students were able to leave the workshop today with some new ideas about being supportive to people with disabilities and different ways of learning. 

The presenters had 2 posters up on the wall for the students to reference during the activities today:

Defenitions

Things to reflect about and act on

I can see how this would be really beneficial on a school-wide level to introduce students to the ideas of difference.  I was very happy they were in our classroom today.

Group planning sheet used to record answers to questions on how to make an case scenario more inclusive

Group shot of class and presenters

Spinner used to determine the category of the question asked.  Groups were awarded points, based on the answers provided

The last activity of the groups involved wearing a blindfold to see what it could be like to be blind or visually impaired.  The students who were blindfolded had to rely on the instruction provided by their group members to find the die, which was placed in a random part of the room by one of the facilitators.

I managed to piece together a video of Jack and Kortnee looking for the die.

Another big thing -- and this is school wide and trend among many -- concerned the use of the word RETARD.  This is an offensive word and learned to understand how disrespectful it is to people with intellectual or developmental challenges.  I include myself in that group, although it may not be obvious.

I am pretty sure I have the link for a website and campaign to explain why this word is incorrect.  Please have a look at http://www.centrefordreams.ca/r-word.html

HOMEWORK:  There was no homework tonight.  Any outstanding homework is posted on the tracking chart in the class for the students to look at .