This blog began in Room 52 at AMG Junior and Senior Public School in 2011.
This site has followed me to a few schools since then and now joined the roster of retired blogs in the social media universe. The journey and reflection will continue in different and exciting spaces.
Room 52 remains one of the most significant places of teaching and learning for me and grateful to the students and staff who supported me there. Thank you.
The Grade 7s are off on their skating trip today. It looks as though they are going to have some beautiful weather. I hope I will be able to have some photos to post up, but we will see.
The Character Chairs, which I was going to continue today, will be put off until tomorrow when we are all together, as a class. I do have a short clip of a video of Tamar doing the warm-up exercise for the performance.
Sorry, the resolution is not so good. The purpose of the exercise is to ask the question -- what are you doing? -- in the tone of voice, and with expression, based on the list of scenarios. Can you guess which one Tamar did?
A couple of quick shots of people in character:
The Cheetah
The snake
The Grade 8 graduation composite photo will be happen next week. Here is the information:
The Grade 8s, on their way towards doing work on the Pythagorean Theorem, are working on angles. I may have mentioned that we are doing a review of Grade 6 expectations on angles and then moving to Grade 8 work. We will be looking at some Grade 8 work today, using an older textbook. It is a Grade 7 textbook, when the work on Complementary and Supplementary angles were a part of the Grade 7 curriculum.
What am I talking about? Well, here is a Youtube video about these type of angles:
We did not get to the different angles today, but from the work we took up, I identified 2 examples I will use to launch tomorrow's lesson:
HOMEWORK
Grade 7s to complete page 181 in Math Character Chair will conclude tomorrow!
To give this some context, I found a fun video from Youtube:
Since this Math is looking at triangles with Right Angles, I thought a review of angles was in order. In talking with the 8s, I realized that they did not do a lot of work with protractors last year, or with angles, so we will put this exciting exploration on hold until we do some angle review.
Once again, Youtube is a great source for a lot of review videos on so many different subjects:
For the Grade 7s, we are doing a review -- and introduction for some -- of the Perimeter and Area of a rectangle. Yes, another catchy video from Youtube:
To have a little refresher, I asked the students to use different coloured Post-its to record what they thought Perimeter and Area are:
Ideas which came the closest to the definition of Perimeter
Ideas which came closest to explaining Area
Props go out to Jessica (and a few others) for staying on top of their homework. Here is a sample of brainstorming for the upcoming Character Chair performance, which begins tomorrow.
Jessica's homework helped redirect the modeling I did in front of the class for the Character Chair. If you notice, Jessica has indicated the character she will be role playing and has surrounded it by a few details from her story. Using the same format, I came up with this:
This has been such a full week, work wise.
Reports Cards are dues, IEPs need to be updated as we are in a bit of a grey zone between the First and Second term. So, I am just going to upload a number of images and write around them and how they relate to what we have been up to.
This short movie is related to two videos that I used to frame a Reading Comprehension/Media Literacy assignment. It has been marked and will be returned on Monday.
This exercise relates to the Oral Communication/Writing Storytelling assignment (that was a mouthful). The students are now building on the frameworks they worked on this week and preparing to perform a Character Chair. This means that they have to assume the role of a character from their Story/Myth for 20-30 seconds to explain what it is about.
This is sort of a warmup for the actual Storytelling that will happen in a few weeks.
I am pretty certain this is not a double-post, but will remove it if it is. This is something we did in the Progress Report term where the students had to do a self-evaluation/assessment of their Learning Skills and Work Habits. I did one, to model it, but now realize that I forgot to assign myself any letters for (N)eeding Improvement, (S)atisfactory, (G)ood, or (E)xcellent! I get an N for that!
Reading Buddies, from Earlier in the week.
A signal of a new beginning: Term 1 Tracking Chart work is gone and a new era begins!
The Grade 6 and 7 students traveled to Central Tech for a Careers Day visit. I did not attend, but Mrs. Machado sent me a couple of photos. I haven't followed up to see where or what they were doing when these photos were taken.
The Grade 8s went skating yesterday at Harbourfront. It was cold, but a lot of fun. Here are some images from our trip:
Homework
Parent Teacher Interview forms (if you do not need one, please fill out the form and return in) Brainstorm for Character Chair (Mr. P will model on Monday) Ensure your Story Structure framework is complete (Mr. P will provide you with feedback)
The Second Term will be beginning shortly and I will back to blogging in a couple of days. It is now the Report Card writing time, but I will be posting some points of interest and importance.
The following pages are to help students with the first piece of homework for this term. Because the students will be doing a Storytelling Unit (I think this has been mentioned before), they will be setting up the "telling" of their stories by using a particular framework. I first came across this about 5 years ago and found it on the following website: http://www.homeschoollearning.com/units/pdf/storytelling/storytelling_storystructure02.pdf
Some students were finding it a little difficult to plug their story into the framework. Well, here is the sample of Little Red Riding Hood taken from the homeschoollearning website.
The Grade 7s will be attending a field trip on the afternoon of February 5. A permission form will be going home today.
The Grade 8s will be skating this Thursday at Harbourfront. Permission forms are due:
$6 for Skate Rental, $5 for helmet rental, and a lunch!!
I had asked for all students to hand in a rough copy of their opinion paragraphs, so I can provide them with some constructive feedback. I am pleased that 8 students did this and, perhaps, another one is working on it tonight. The assignment is due tomorrow!
Here are a couple of examples of the feedback on the rough drafts. In one case, the student added more information on the page and has now moved on to type up his paragraph:
In a similar exercise, I introduced the students to something a friend of mine, Samantha Lanaway, did when she taught English. She provided them with a template to organize their ideas. Not only do the students have to write a reason -- to support the topic sentence -- but they have to add an example. In my opinion, this will make their writing stronger. Here is an example I provided:
This style of writing will be built upon and developed more in the second term.
There will be a test tomorrow. THE final test for the unit on Measurement. As always, Rewrites are available for students who score below 50%. Play the games online, which I posted yesterday, as a way of reviewing. We will do a final review, in class, tomorrow.
HOMEWORK -Storytelling framework - Media poster -final paragraph (Opinion based) - Parent - Teacher interview forms
Please excuse the heavy handed reference to God and the Bible, this a short example of how to set up a concluding or closing sentence for a paragraph.
In addition to this video, we also did a paragraph puzzle type of activity where sentences needed to be placed in order:
All the groups agreed that #2 was the Topic Sentence and #1 was the Closing or Concluding sentence. The supporting details came next. Two groups agreed on the exact order of the supporting details : 2, 4, 3, 5, 1. Another thought it could be: 2, 5, 4, 3, 1 and the last group considered: 2, 3, 5, 4, 1.
The last group's suggestion had the sentence beginning with "Also" as the second sentence. Usually, the word also follows another sentence with a supporting detail.
We followed this up with an activity where the students were given a concluding or closing sentence and then had to build a paragraph. I have done this before, but can be a little abstract for the class. So, I do one as an example. Here are the stages of this exercise that I have for the class to see:
These exercises are designed to help the students in writing their own
paragraphs. They will be doing this
tonight. THE FINAL COPIES WILL BE DUE BY FRIDAY
and they will be doing a rough
draft for me tonight with the idea
that they will be getting feedback
from me and make any necessary
changes.
2 completed copies done by students:
The Success Criteria for the paragraph is here:
Yesterday, we through are second reading of the Fables. Again, this is practice for the Storytelling unit we will be getting into in the end of the Term 1/start of Term 2. The presenters did much better in terms of not reading their scripts and telling the stories.
Here is a video of Kevin and Brandon presenting their fables
and doing the "Expression" warm-up exercise.
The final Math test for this Place Value/Measurement Unit will take place on Thursday. We did some review today and we will continue with it tomorrow. I would direct you to this lengthy video, which I have posted before, that may help some of you review:
I think this is it.
This is a handout that I think of as a 99% guarantee for understanding how metric conversion works using the infamous King Henry chart. I will read through it tomorrow.
Complete a rough copy of your opinion paragraph. Use the Success Criteria chart to guide you. Feedback will be provided for all completed rough drafts. Final copies of poster are due on Friday, January 31.
I created this distance chart for an upcoming Math test we will be doing. It will concern calculating distances and being able to convert from one unit to another. It is based on a homework activity we did last week.
Term 1 interviews will be taking place on Thursday, February 13 between 4 and 8 p.m.
Together, we came up with a Success Criteria chart for the Media/Art/Writing assignment. It was based on the Brainstorm chart I had posted before (Monday, January 20), but this one was done with a lot more student input. This will be used as the basis for grading/evaluating the final posters, which are due on Wednesday.
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