Thursday, April 25, 2013

Homework:

Stick conversation on the weather in Toronto.  What is a stick conversation? 
I am trying to determine how much the student know about weather and what things affect the weather.  So, I thought I would as the students to use simple figures to have a short conversation about what they know.  This work is to be done in the Geography notebook.  Some students have not completed their title pages for Geography.

One character talks to the other about weather patterns.  This exercise is meant to access prior information about weather.

We spent some time during Geography talking a little bit about the human and physical characteristics of particular places.  I decided to focus on the Greater Toronto Area and ask each student to share something -- during a class discussion -- about the physical and human characteristics.  I plan to compile them in a slide show or movie.  I think this will be a good way to review the concepts from the textbook, assess for understanding while reducing the difficulties with writing that the students often have.

There was one item to add to the Show and Tell from a few days ago.  It was a flute that Kenny had for his Show and not Tell:

I forget what it is called and will have to ask him about it.

We are in the final stages of reviewing the Measures of Central Tendency (Mean, Median, and Mode) and we have been doing some Grade 7 level work!  I am very pleased to see the effort by most of the students while working together to solve some of the problems from the book.

This was the original question from the textbook.  A number of students had difficulty with it, so we spent some more time looking at it and broke into smaller groups.

All of the students came up with a number of different ways to solve the question.  I was very impressed because the textbook only offered one answer!

Another questions was posed that involved the same logic as the first question from the textbook.  I set it up because I knew it would relate to the homework questions I created for tonight.

Here is one of the questions for tonight:

Both will be reviewed in detail tomorrow and then a Study Sheet will be assigned for the weekend.

My apologies for the late post this evening.