Thursday, April 28, 2011

Today was the final day of discussion about the Federal election before the Student Vote ballots were cast.  Every student in Room 52 had the opportunity to vote for the candidate in the Davenport riding.  It is a large riding and a number of the students in the class reside in it.  Here is the link for the Student vote website:  http://www.studentvote.ca/home.php

Most of the students, though, were familiar with the main political parties (Conservatives, Green, NDP, and Liberal) and voted along those lines.  Just before the vote, we looked at the websites of these parties and reminded them about the Internet link to find out what candidates are running where they reside.

We did a group exercise today, involving art, which looked at what it might be like to have something you cherish taken away from you.  The idea was aimed at having the students reflect and discuss what it might be like to be unable to vote or have a voice in expressing yourself.  Here are some drawings from a few students: 

The other Art activity today involved doing the prep work for a symmetrical mask using construction paper.  It is my hope that these masks will also be used, in some way, for a Drama activity.  Hopefully, some of the masks may end up looking like this: 

I spent a fair bit of time going through the outlines the students did for their paragraph writing.  Most of the students are understanding the basic parts of the paragraph, but I will spend some more time conferencing with them in the coming days to prepare the students  to write on their own.  We have used the "hamburger" organizer to structure our ideas for our paragraphs.  The model looks like this: 

Since there was a lot of rotary today, I did not see the class a lot.  We continued with the reading of Worse than Boys and, as always, began the day with quiet reading during snack time.