Back to teaching: Community Circle, Math Rewrites and introducing some new work, and the Drake Pasta Lunch

It seems like a long time since we have been in the class.  Fortunately, for a number of students, we had the privilege of visiting Camp Wahanowin.

In this photo, we have just concluded doing a Community Circle from the adventures of last week, which may have included camp or what we did on the weekend.

We had a Math test two weeks ago, on calculating the area of a triangle.  For some students, the option of doing Rewrites were available.  Here is Kaia, completing it with the intention of improving her understanding of the material:

The next portion of the Math will look at calculating some missing variables.  A handout was sent home walking the students through an example question.  The students should read this, for homework, and be prepared to do some questions with Mr. Chung on Tuesday.

One the projects/goals for myself for this year was to develop my competency around using the features associated with Google Classroom.  I have posted a more complete copy of this note, in Word format, on my classroom site:  https://sites.google.com/a/tdsb.on.ca/proudfoot-institute-2016/website-builder  

You should be able to access this page, and print off the note I gave out, from this page.  It is located in the handouts and assignments section.

**update:  I will also attempt to attach the Drake Pasta Lunch form, if one was not brought home.  It is attached and named DPL in the same section where the Math handout is.

Almost back...

Growth Mindset journal ideas, a sample, and looking at the area of a Triangle from another perspective, and packing list reminder for Camp Wahanowin

This posting will serve to present the question and a sample response for Friday's journal question.

If you do not want to look at the screen, this list of items has been given to you and is on the back of the handout that relates to some thoughts on success.

Here is my sample response for the item that is circled;

In Mathematics, we are going to be looking at the area of a triangle, but looking at it through the lens of Algebra.  In the next part of this unit, we will see what happens when the "answer" is given and you have to figure out what either the base or height of the triangle is.  It can be seen in the following example:

 How is this done?  It can be done a number of ways, but I think the easiest way will be through an approach I learned in Science in high school.  I think we called this approach the "magic triangle" way.  This will be explained to the students and we will have some opportunities to practice it.

Happy packing!  Enjoy your long weekend.

Oprah There Are No Mistakes

2 Posts for the class + Honouring Jaime Escalante and connecting it with the Learning Skills and Work Habits

The first image I will post relates to a short note you will take down about these three techniques that you may see in advertising:

As you move in to designing your ad, at least one of these techniques will need to be used.

This second image relates to the YouTube post you will see, which relates to the film, Stand and Deliver.  As you may remember, we often do a journal reflection using the Learning Skills and Work Habits section of the report card.  For this term, the skills we looked at are circled in orange.  A description of each item is listed in the comments section.

You will have a copy of this and your job is to assess your skills for this term.  Give yourself an E, G, S, or N for the six sections.  In the comment section, please reflect on this last term and write some comments on each of the habits and skills, like you have done in the past.

Here is a sample one I did to remind you of the process.  The writing does not need to be as formal or teacher sounding as this:

When I decided to show the film Stand and Deliver I never made the connection between it and the Learning Skills and Work Habits section of the report.  Jaime Escalante, the teacher in the film, uses this word ganas, which translates into "want," in English.  The teacher uses ganas to refer to desire. If I could neatly summarize that section of the report car, I would probably refer to it as the "ganas section."

I forgot that Jaime Escalante has been dead for over 6 years, but his legacy lives on.  Why he felt it was important that students had the knowledge and skills necessary to comprehend a subject, he also knew that students had to develop and nurture their ganas.

I am off, with Mr. Chung, to the Track and Field qualifying meet at Birchmount Stadium and will be back on Thursday.

No, we are not going here:  http://host.madison.com/wiaa-state-track-field-meet-saturday-s-results/article_7d37c3c2-ea86-11e3-9287-0019bb2963f4.html

Jaime Escalante quote

Map of Camp Wahanowin & Weather Network: Orillia, ON for camp next week

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/weather/ontario/orillia

Here is a map:

Short Review of Area of Triangle Quiz, Grade 7 Boys Reflective Health Project & the "act like a Man" box sample from the Grade 8 boys

There will be a short quiz today in the Resource Math class.  This was written on the board on Friday and all students were encouraged to write in the agenda.

This will be a short quiz, but we will have some time for review with these online games.

This is a straightforward review of the area of a right angled triangle:  http://www.mathgames.com/skill/6.121-area-of-right-triangles

A virtual Geoboard:

http://www.mathplayground.com/geoboard.html

Classic Jeopardy Game:

https://jeopardylabs.com/play/area-problems-rectangles-parallelograms-triangles

The Grade 7 Boys have a reflective Health project to complete, based on our past unit.  Here is the assignment template, which may be modified.

As we were reviewing this assignment, I did not have my laptop to share the "act like a man box" exercise we did in class.  Here is what we came up with:

The boys will understand the words that are on the outside of the box.  I apologize, in advance for some of the profane language, but these were words that the students came up with for this exercise.

Returning to Media Literacy and Resource Math notes

This post will need to be elaborated on, but we are returning to some work on Media Literacy.  When I posted some sample of print ads, the students came back with a few observations.  There are not the full sample of responses, but it will give you an idea of what they observed and the feedback I gave them.

As we were talking about our observations, the idea of using Photoshop came up to change how items appear.  So, with some investigating we came up with this list from a website.

http://www.trulydeeply.com.au/brand/food-photography-and-manipulation-in-advertising-why-do-we-accept-knowingly-being-lied-to/

We looked into item number 7 and came up with this sample:

http://food.sndimg.com/img/recipes/24/76/57/large/picv8HSAm.jpg

This would be more realistic:  the syrup being absorbed into the pancake.  That is a lot of syrup!

http://a57.foxnews.com/global.fncstatic.com/static/managed/img/U.S./876/493/ihoppancakes.jpg?ve=1&tl=1

The syrup on this pancake does not appear to be soaking in at all.

We will return to some of the theory of Media Literacy on Tuesday and begin to work on our advertisement for the products we planned, earlier in the term.

In Math we are looking at a combined unit of Algebra and Measurement.  To assess our understanding so far, I posted this question and had someone answer it.  Before we did that, we broke down the question and listed all of the information we knew about how we might solve the question:

Once we reviewed the question, I gave the student one question each to solve and marked it. The majority of the class did very well, but we do have some reviewing to do and that is okay.

After each question that I graded, I posted up the answer and we deconstructed it.

HOMEWORK
Math:  Complete word problems on page 160 and attempt to solve the three questions, which were cut out.  I know they are challenging and may seem impossible, but see if you can work backward to solve them.  

Any outstanding work on homework chart.

Enjoy your weekend.

Fires in Fort McMurray, NYT inference exercise, tackling a fur trade article...

A couple of warmup activities:

Here is 7B's contribution to are skills of developing accountable talk in our History class:

Returning to an old item on Fort McMurray fire post:
http://rumblingsfrom52.blogspot.ca/2016/05/fort-mcmurray-brief-history-current.html

This is an inference exercise we will start today and conclude on Monday.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/whats-going-on-in-this-picture-may-4-2015/?_r=0

Yesterday, I posted a link to an article on the fur trade.  It is quite long and we will only look at half of it today.  The link to the article I posted yesterday:  http://web.a.ebscohost.com/pov/detail/detail?sid=3578a27f-cc61-4dce-8fbf-475db4129e8b%40sessionmgr4004&vid=0&hid=4101&bdata=Jmxhbmc9ZW4tY2Emc2l0ZT1wb3YtY2Fu

One of the reading strategies we used involved looking at the topic and concluding sentences for each of the paragraphs, to get a sense of what the paragraph was about.   Since we have engaged in a couple of 4 Corner exercises and completed the jot notes assignment, we have developed some prior knowledge about the fur trade in Canada.  Here is a sample of the text:

Eventually, we will begin to sort some of the ideas for this article, and then an article that is pro-fur, using a graphic organizer.

4 Corners: Part 2 and an article for examination using some reading strategies

We will continue with Part 2 of our 4 corners exercise and then move into analyzing this article, which has a particular point of view on Canada's fur trade.

http://web.b.ebscohost.com/pov/detail/detail?sid=cb278dc5-6859-481a-9263-76ce62c22bab%40sessionmgr106&vid=0&hid=125&bdata=Jmxhbmc9ZW4tY2Emc2l0ZT1wb3YtY2Fu#db=p3h&AN=28674939

4x100m Relay Exchanges: looking at the Pros; Area of a Rectangle and Triangle; a short video of our History discussion and Four Corner discussion from Tuesday, last 2 Book Talk presenters

Samples from the recent World Track and Field Championships in Beijing, China.

The new work in the Resource Math class has to do with a combination of Measurement and Algebra.
 

Some clips from our "Accountable Talk" discussion.  In it, you will hear a mix of the discussion on the merits of the fur trade, along with a scenario I presented to the group on peer pressure and friendship.  Some of the camera angles deliberately avoided the faces of the speakers, who did not want to have a camera on them.  This video was from the discussion with 7A.

Here is an image of members of 7B in the four corners exercise on the fur trade.  Each corner of the room is broken down as agree, strongly agree, strongly disagree, disagree.  A statement was read that was against the fur trade and the students had to align themselves with a position.

Here are the final two presenters for the Book Talks:

Developing "Accountable Talk"

This post will be ironed out a little more, but this video will be important for the next steps in a discussion we will be having in History.

From the 1 minute mark on, you will see this group of Grade 5 students engage in an example of accountable talk.

to be continued...

Resource Math Test, final screening of our Hot Docs for Schools Festival , & Boys Health project

Kaia's Study Sheet

Out of 11 students, 5 completed Study Sheets for the test.
The Study Sheet may be used during the test.

Before we do it, I will offer the students the opportunity to play a few games related to Mean, Median, and Mode.

http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hmcam/animath/swf/mean_median_and_mode.swf

http://www.henryanker.com/Math/Number_Sense/Describing_Numbers/Finding_the_Median_Set_1.swf

https://jeopardylabs.com/play/mean-median-mode-range-team-quiz2

The final documentary, The Backward Class is an inspirtational story about a group of students who are known as Untouchables, under the Indian Caste system.

Another connection we are making through Media, is in the Boys' Health class.  We have been working at the Human Development and Sexual Health section.  One of the areas that has come up in our discussions is around the issue of identity and what it means to be a boy.  This falls under the topics of "...social labeling, gender identity, sexual orientation, self-concept issues, [and] relationships...."  This is from Section 3.3 of the curriculum.

To supplement this, we are taking a selective look at the film, The Mask you Live In."  The trailer is below.

Before viewing a small portion of the documentary, I had the boys brainstorm ideas about what it, to them, to be a boy.  Initially, this was difficult for some, so I did some modeling, based on some of the ideas some other boys in class shared with me:

Providing context for the documentary on Rehtaeh Parsons

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/04/10/rehtaeh-parson-dad-glen-canning-letter_n_3055641.html

Before screening No Place to Hide:  The Rehtaeh Parsons Story, it will be important to review a few key concepts and provide some context for the documentary.  In Health class, we have been paying attention to the issue of "consent," which has been talked about in the Human Development and Sexual Health section of the new curriculum.

In addition, Personal Safety and Injury Prevention cannot be overlooked.  In the Health Curriculum, it encourages discussion and exploration around the benefits and dangers of technology and the impact of bullying and harassment.  These topics intersect in today's documentary.

Rehtaeh's Dad, Glenn Canning, wrote a piece called My Years Without Rehtaeh Taught Me That Kids Need To Know About Consent.  I posted a link to this article a couple of days ago and I was trying to think about how to set up the viewing of a documentary that was not as "light" as some of the others we are talking.  Mr. Chung suggested using this video to assist with the explanation of consent:

So, before we begin the screening, we will take a moment to connect the curriculum to this video, to the ideas and questions you may have, with some of the key messages Glenn Canning shared in his blog entry.

Tomorrow will be our final day of viewing documentaries, as part of out Hot Docs for Schools festival.

"All the Time in the World" Hot Doc & journal response question, Fort McMurray: A brief history & current event [work postponed until Thursday, due to a Science Lab]

This is a photo from the second Hot Docs screening in Room 52.  For each screening, a question is posed to the students to respond to.  In this case, for this film, All the Time in the World, it will be a reflective question about the nature of time.

 The homework for the film is to respond to one of these questions in your journal.

 Item of Inference

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ea/06/ba/ea06ba84a5fe415157f4820f7f98d72c.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/95/62/5b/95625b3b0bc8dd1e2dc8b762e63503e1.jpg

https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Fort+McMurray,+AB/@56.7050486,-129.2300641,4z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x53b03aeeff1a4459:0x5c8133330dca74b7

Current event in Fort McMurray:  http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-wildfire-remains-out-of-control-after-city-evacuated-1.3563977