Monday

For the weekend, the students had to finish doing a Reading Response for a set of Nelson Mandela quotations that were posted on the blog.  I had them as a collection on Friday and asked the students to select one to respond to.

The next project in writing is going to involve looking at writing a persuasive paragraph.  For some reason, I seem to feel that I should capitalize it.  Maybe it's a teacher thing.  My thinking behind this rests with the ides that Tweens and Teens have opinions of a lot of things.  Why not put that to use and combine that with the work they have already been doing on writing sentences?

So, we used the Community Circle forum as a launching pad for sharing some opinions.  The ideas they share are not 100% complete and may be subject to more development, but this initial brainstorm exercise is a place to start.  Here is a video, which I hope uploads, with some of the class members sharing ideas:

THE VIDEO DOES NOT SEEM TO BE UPLOADING.  I BELIEVE IT HAS TO DO WITH THE SIZE OF IT.  I MAY HAVE TO TINKER WITH IT.

Another reason I am using this particular method for writing has to do with the upcoming OSSLT (Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test) in Grade 10.  For one of the exercises, the students have to write 3 persuasive paragraphs on a given topic.  Here is an image I took of the page from last May's assessment:

The link for more information on the OSSLT (a requirement, if you want to graduate from high school) may be found at http://www.eqao.com/Educators/Secondary/10/BookletsandGuides.aspx?Lang=E&gr=10&yr=13

 Although I have not always posted this exercise on the blog, we usually respond to the New York Times Monday post of What's Going on in This Picture.  The link for this fun activity is posted here:
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/category/lesson-plans/whats-going-on-in-this-picture/

It is a way for the students to have some fun, and think critically, about the image they see and use the clues to try and make some meaning from the image.

In Math, we are looking at numbers in the tenths to thousandths place value.  To supplement the homework, I am showing a couple of videos that look at small numbers.  The first one is from the 2012 Olympics where the scores for the Gymnastics are often scored down to the thousandths of a point:

Gymnastics are scored to the thousandths of a digit.

Also, equally as impressive, are a series of close finishes from the Indy Car Series.  The finishing places of some of the cars boil down to thousandths of a second!

There is no homework assigned tonight, but your son or daughter may have outstanding work that they need to complete.