Friday, October 21, 2016

Homework, Group Reading Response on Creepy clowns, updates to some Social Studies work

Homework Board

The Prime Factorization worksheet is now due on the 25th of October.  A number or students still had some old work to catch up on and I did not want to rush them.

This is the homework board today, as of 12:20 on Friday.  Time is provided in class for students to ask questions and begin the work in the classroom.  Two periods, this afternoon, will be devoted to working on some of these items.

I returned the Reading Responses, which the students completed several weeks ago.  I usually do not like holding onto material for so long and will avoid repeating this.  For each student, I provided some detailed "descriptive feedback," which is aimed at directing the students to improve the response.  For those of you at Curriculum Night, this would be seen as an example of assessment as learning (what can we learned and improved upon in the process/task).

We are going to a class Reading Response and I decided to pick the topic of creepy clowns.  The students have been talking about it and the stories are quite prominent in the media.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/10/19/creepy-clowns-make-real-clowns-sad.html
There was an article I read from last week's Saturday Star, but I think it is too dense.  Still, it has some interesting elements, which we used as part of a class discussion.  The article was originally from The Chicago Tribune.




In the article, there was a mention of Ronald McDonald being an example of "predatory marketing" and being very similar to the Joe Camel image for cigarettes. 

from http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/joe-camel-ads
Sometimes, there are organizations that attempt to critique such ads.  We will be introducing and looking at elements of advertising in the Media Literacy strand of the Language program very soon.  Here is a spoof ad by a group based out of Vancouver, I believe, who are called Adbusters.

https://www.adbusters.org/spoofads/tobacco/
Somehow, this discussion got us on to the idea of vaping (e-cigarettes) and I pointed out the type of marketing often associated with electronic cigarettes and vaping.  Here is one such example.

https://www.vapes.com/blogs/news/pokemon-e-juice-a-new-low-in-vaping

But we must return to the issue of clowns for our group response.

The news story attached to this can be seen here: 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/canadian-tire-clowns-1.3808925


After reading the article from the Star, and making some notes, here is our response:








Update to Social Studies homework items:

In the orange print, I made some jot notes of the description on the left, so it might be easier to comprehend.

I added a few details to the "Exploring" section of the Inquiry.