Tuesday

Curriculum Night is this Thursday at AMG for The Grove Community School and Alexander Muir Gladstone Ave. PS.  Please join us at the school at 6:30 in the Gym before going to visit the classrooms.

Last year, there was an exercise that was fun and developed the students' inferencing skills.  It is based on an exercise the New York Times puts out every week.  Here is the link to it:

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/category/lesson-plans/whats-going-on-in-this-picture/

Here is the image from yesterday's post (they do it, usually, every Monday).  I will model a response for the students to see.

UPDATE:  Here is what we came up with for today's entry.  I started to type in some of my observations, and the students contributed some ideas:

The students performed extremely well on the Math test last Friday.  

Here is a list -- which may grow -- of students who scored above a Level 3:

The next phase of this fraction unit will begin to look at questions which involve adding with different denominators.  I posed this question yesterday to see how the students would do:

The students had a go of investigating and trying to figure out how to solve it.  I was curious to see if there would be any students who would do it without multiplying the denominators (to come in a later lesson) to make them the same.  Here are some images of them working:

This group, ultimately, came up with the correct solution.

I was pleased to see the efforts.  They are posted up in the classroom and will be looked at, to see where the logic was close or not so close.

The group which came up with the correct solution used multiplication.

One thing I try to do in the class is provide a lot of constructive feedback and information for the students.  I managed to piece together the various responses of the problem I posed and added some comments.  I will use those comments to help with explaining some of the ideas more.  This way, the ideas of the students are validated.  Here are a couple of snapshots:

Prior to today's lesson, I was trying to explain how to solve the question without using multiplication.  I modeled this solution, with the help of the students.  The accompanying video was done after the students had left the room and summarizes our discussion.

This video was a created after school and summarizes the approach I took in class when explaining this question.

We began to work on the 4 Corners exercise, based on key themes and concepts from Lois Lowry's The Giver.  It took a bit of time to organize the group, but we managed to have the students go to the corners for the first statement, and I paraphrase here,:  A society without unemployment, jealousy, and competition would be an ideal society to live in.

As a reminder, the students had to go through the list of 11 statements and select how they felt about  them, but they only had to record reasons for 3 of the statements.  Each student is responsible for speaking at least once during the discussion.  Here is a panoramic shot of the class.  I think Brendan is missing.

HOMEWORK:

Double sided Math sheet

Curriculum Information sheet (I believe the start time is 6 and not 6:30.  Sorry about that.)

Outstanding work (old stuff):  The students can always check the Homework Chart to see what work they have not completed.  Here is a shot of it:

When a student says they have no homework, I remind them to check this to see if they all smiley faces or a number of Xs.  Unless an assignment is time sensitive, work can always be completed.