This blog began in Room 52 at AMG Junior and Senior Public School in 2011.
This site has followed me to a few schools since then and now joined the roster of retired blogs in the social media universe. The journey and reflection will continue in different and exciting spaces.
Room 52 remains one of the most significant places of teaching and learning for me and grateful to the students and staff who supported me there. Thank you.
Former world record holder, Liu Xiang has always been a source of inspiration for me. In 2008, he had to leave the 110m Hurdle race in Beijing with the whole stadium and nation watching him. He had a severe Achilles Tendon injury and attempted to run, but could not. Here are some photos of him and a video of the unfortunate race in Beijing.
This must have been a very difficult moment for him, but Liu Xiang was able to bounce back from this tragic moment. This is where the Math comes in!
As he went through recovery and rehabilitation, Liu Xiang demonstrated an incredible amount of resilience. He was able to bounce back, being patient, and taking the time he needed to prepare himself, once again, for competition. In the end, during his comeback race, he lost by a mere thousandth (0.001) of a second.
There you have it; Character education meets Place Value.
We did our Sentence tests today. They will be marked on Monday. From looking at the early results from the Promethean Board/Activ Expression test, there will probably need to be a review. The Math test and final Spelling dictation have been moved to Monday.
Reading Buddies took place in Mr. McLaughlin's room. I snapped a couple of shots:
The last 2 are from the rehearsals from the Winter concert, which will take place this Tuesday. Enjoy your weekend. It is almost time for the break; there will be a 4 day week next week!
The Math test scheduled for tomorrow has been put off until Monday. There were two final sheets to review and take up and I did not feel comfortable giving a test while there was unfinished work to be reviewed.
To help some of the students improve at responding to the weekly New York Times exercise of figuring out what is going on in a particular photo. The Grade 7s came up with some ideas that we added to a Success Chart that will be posted in the class when the students have to do this activity.
I decided to add a response to the photo, as well.
Some of the time was spent getting ready for tomorrow's test on understanding and writing out different types of sentences. Here is a preview of what to expect, using the Activ Expression, devices and an image of reminders about the 3 types of sentences we learned.
HOMEWORK
Sentence test in 2 parts: Promethean Activ Expression part + Writing portion (being able to write a Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentence)
Preparations are being made for 2 tests for this week. One will be in Math and Language. For both tests, there will be an interactive component where the students will use these Blackberry looking devices to answer a series of questions (True and False and Multiple Choice) using the Active Expression 2 hardware.
I have not used this hardware since last year, so I spent the evening familiarizing myself on how it works and also with setting up the 2 quizes.
There will be a writing component for both tests and will look at the students' abilities at being able to write Complex Sentences and understand how Place Value works, when decimals are involved.
We have been very busy doing a lot of review, and assessment on these topics.
We played a game in Math, similar to the one where the students had to create very larger numbers, while playing with a partner. In this game, the object was to create the largest number, but it involved a decimal point. Here are some game play images, along with some of the reference points we used to better understand the topic.
A completed game card with all work completed
A screen shot of some athletes from the 2012 Olympics. We were paying attention to their scores and how they were measured to the 1000th decimal point.
A fictional exercise based on the world of Gymnastics. Thanks to Eric for completing this for the class to see.
In the realm of writing, sample are always showing up on the board somewhere. The name of the game is repetition and understanding. If the students practice, I do my best to provide them with feedback so they will know where they went wrong and how to improve.
There was no homework tonight, but it is advisable that the students begin to prepare for the tests at the end of the week. Actually, Spelling was assigned this evening and is due on Friday. I walked through the Spelling Sheet with them and will welcome any questions, if the students are feeling confused.
It looks as though my video sizes are too large. I read on another site that they should not be larger than 100mb and the size of film, even when broken into smaller parts, tops out at about 150mb. So, the size of these videos may not be that large and I will know that they must be edited into smaller chunks in the future.
There were also some students who were on Global News about Kathleen, the dancing crossing guard. Here is a brief video about her and a link to the current news story
Like good teaching, assignments are often broken down into smaller parts. So, I am attempting to break the movie I tried to publish into smaller sizes. Okay, let's take a shot at this:
Okay, this is a bit of a problem. I have spent a lot of time trying to make this work. Patience, Mr. Proudfoot, go back to the drawing board.
What I will post will be something the Grade 7s have to pick up on in the morning. As we prepare to begin working on our Persuasive Paragraphs. Here is another sample of a Complex Sentence:
This rather scenic image comes with a quote from the character known as Morpheus, from The Matrix who imparts some wisdom to Neo, the chosen one, about making a choice.
I have always believed that we have choice and agency. A student may decide to complete homework or they may not. When time is provided in class to catch up on missed work, a student may or may not decide to use that time.
This is like the door that Neo, the chosen one, must decide to go through. Students have choice; they may not be always easy decisions, and require some work, but that is life.
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:
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.
I updated yesterday's post based on an error in a photo I posted. I had mistakenly identified a number as being in the thousandths place value, but I wrote it as 0.08 when it should have been 0.008. Thanks to Caleb for pointing this out!
This photo is for an exercise, similar to the one we did for large numbers, where the students are responsible for building 3 separate numbers with Base 10 materials and then writing them out in three different forms (2 for the Grade 7s, they don't do the exponential form).
While we were reviewing this for Friday, December 6, Caleb pointed out my error with the representation of the 0.008 (eight thousandths). I had mistakenly written it as 0.08 (eight hundredths).
Here are a few images of the 8s working on them.
To supplement the teaching of this material, I used a few videos from Youtube.
These videos may be reviewed to help with the work we are doing in class.
The Grade 8s were working ahead of the Grade 7s and I had some of them help the Grade 7s to start on their homework.
Like in Math, our building continued with our work on developing Complex Sentences. For homework the other night, I had students build some Complex sentences (which is an independent + dependent clause) using some work from a sheet that was handed out last week.
The students select a Dependent clause (marked in D) and pair it with a complete thought (an Independent clause) to create a Complex sentence. To support this exercise, we also checked out this neat Youtube video:
Tamar did a really good job coming up with a Complex Sentence all on his own. Here it is:
Recent updates to the some recent tests. Eric and Jessica completed some Rewrites and bumped up their marks above 70%.
There is no homework tonight, although there are some people who have old assignments which need to be done. There is a trip tomorrow to Oakwood Collegiate to watch a musical. This will be happening in the afternoon; TTC fare will be covered by AMG.
We will be starting in on looking at numbers that are less than a whole (sometimes known as decimals). In a review for the last Math test, I posted some games. I left this off because it involved decimals and have decided to post it now for the students to play. As the Math unit progresses, the students will feel more comfortable with answering these questions.
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.
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.
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