Late Monday

The Grade 8s had an afternoon trip to Parkdale CI on Friday.  The students were broken into smaller groups -- much like our trip to Central Tech -- and given a tour of the school.  I snapped a couple of photos of the school:

 Of course, on the walk back to AMG, I had to take a few photos along the journey.

For more information on the Open Houses available at TDSB high schools, please follow this link:  http://www.tdsb.on.ca/HighSchool/GoingtoHighSchool/OpenHousesandInformationNights.aspx

It was quite a busy Friday.  It was Day 1 and we had Reading Buddies

which led in an introductory lesson on Complex Sentences.  I think I had a nice image from Thursday's blog entry that broke down this sentence into two parts:

Independent Clause or Principal Clause + conjunction + Dependent Clause or Subordinate Clause =
COMPLEX SENTENCE

Sometimes the clauses may be switched around and the complex sentence will make sense.  You can see this in the images of Jessica and Eric, who are both playing around with the order of the clauses:

On a similar note, there was a game, I would like to think of it as a game, that allowed the students to make pairings of the Independent Clauses (in red) with the Dependent Clauses ( in green).

Initially, I thought you could move the clause order around, but I was wrong.  Here is a sample showing my error.  It was a sentence made by Kevin:

While the sentence reads correctly, the capital letter and period are in the wrong portion of the sentence.  It should read:  Tortured by recollections of last night, the girls danced down the street.

I think I managed to make a screen video of a portion of this discussion.  I will attempt to post it:

**It is possible, that in this video, a mistake in the order of the clauses was made.  That's okay because we can learn from our mistakes.**

This reminder about homework will not help a lot of students, who are probably now asleep.

- The Spelling dictation was postponed until tomorrow morning
- The Complex Sentence homework sheet is due tomorrow
- Rewrites for the Math test were due today
- Spelling unit work was due on Friday

I have been pleased with the efforts of a number of students who have been working hard to address the issue of incomplete and late assignments.  Students are able to monitor this by looking at the homework tracking sheet in class.