Sunday, May 5, 2014

The Grade 8s had the special treat of visiting the Cadbury factory on Gladstone Avenue, just north of Dundas.  The trip was a fun closing activity for their unit on Automation for Science.  I was not allowed to take many photos -- because of the Cadbury secret-- but here are a few:

In terms of the paragraph scramble exercise we did this week.  There are a few finishing shots of the activity, the assembled paragraphs, and the correct order of sentences.

The next stage of this writing will have the students use topics they selected to write a narrative paragraph.  Here are the selected topics the students wanted to write about:

The idea will be to pair the topic with an image to tell a story.  For example:

Trine and Tracey want to write a paragraph around the topic of baking.  I will provide them with this image, they will do some brainstorming around it, and then work towards writing a narrative paragraph.  This exercise/assignment will unfold over the first few days of the new week.

As far as Math goes, the Grade 7s are learning about Algebra.  For a lot of them, this appears to be an intimidating topic.  I am going to search the Internet to see if I can find some videos and games to support some of the concepts we looked at on Friday.  I was prepared to assign homework, but I could see that they were struggling with some of the work and concepts, so I held back.  I really believe that students should have homework they understand, not to have homework just to have something.

We left our lesson on Friday with this image on the Promethean Board:

We will return to this on Tuesday morning.

As far as the Grade 8 Math goes, we are exploring the Addition, and eventually Subtraction, of Integers.  So far, I have taught them two methods:  with counters, and using a number line.  The question is (-7)+(+5).

The red are the negatives and the yellow are positives.  The pairs are the numbers which cancel one another out and leave 2 reds or negative 2 (-2)

I find it difficult to use the counters to explain subtraction, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve to help with that.

A few weeks ago, before I taught any formal lesson on adding or subtracting, I posted a few questions on the board to see how the students would do.  Here is a sample of Kevin's answer:

HOMEWORK

The only homework was for the Grade 8s in Math out of the textbook.  At the moment, I do not have the pages, but I do remember all students writing the assigned questions in their Math notebook.

Continue to enjoy the long weekend.