Thursday, May 24, 2007

Thursday Roundup: May 24th!

I have forgotten to post homework on here for the last two days, so here is a quick rundown of what is going on:

1) Language Arts: Students are finishing up the poems they haven't finished (we are almost completely caught up by now!) and when they are done they are assembling them into books. We will be sharing some of our poems on Monday.

2) Socials: We have a final assignment for the unit. Students are to find new uses for the following parts of a car:
  • The seats

  • The windows

  • The steering wheel

  • The metal body

  • The tires

  • The gas tank

  • The lights

  • The radio/tape/cd player

  • The seatbelt

  • The mirrors

  • The license plate

  • The engine

  • The windshield wipers

  • Anything else you can think of (bonus marks if you do)

3) Personal Planning: I am in the process of putting together a script from the student's work. We will potentially be filming our video on Monday and Tuesday if we are able to finish it.

4) Science: There will be a final test for simple machines on Tuesday. The students have a review sheet to try. If they can answer the questions on that sheet, they should be able to do well on the test...

That's all for now. I will be at the Zone track meet with some students tomorrow so there will not likely be any homework posted.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Thursday Roundup

The last few days have been very busy and thus I have been unable to post the homework, though there was none and is none for the long weekend.

Here is a short bit about where we are in each subject area:

Math: we have just started talking about perimeter and area using geoboards.

Language Arts: We finished our rough copies of Hexaduad poems today. Next week we will be talking about poetry in music and on Monday the 28th we will have a Poetry Cafe for students to read their poetry to their classmates.

Socials: We talked about not making waste and are looking at how we can reuse all the parts of everyday objects when we are finished with them. We will have a big object to work with next week as a final assignment in this unit. I am also in the planning stages of a field trip in June.

Personal Planning: We have begun work on a class video to present all of the information we have learned about smoking and tobacco. We will work on this next week and film it the last two days (the 28th and 29th) I am in the classroom.

Have a great long weekend!

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Tuesday Roundup

There was no homework today so here is a quick recap of the day:

Science - we talked about the last simple machine: screws. A screw is a inclined plane wrapped around a core.

Personal Planning: We made something of a plan for our video and assigned roles to everyone. We spent a good amount of time working on the various parts that will be included in the video.

Math: We took up the homework that had been assigned last night on measuring the distance around a circular object.

Socials: We discussed yesterdays lesson about the parts of a buffalo and used that as a starting point to look at wasting and why it's important not to waste. We started an activity where we're taking an everyday object and trying to figure out how we could reuse that object in another way. Next class we will work with a larger object with many parts and the students will prepare a report about how they would use that object's parts.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Personal Planning: Video

We started talking about what we are going to make for our final class project for our Tobacco Unit. We listed all the main ideas that we had to include and we decided that we would do it in a Talk Show format. I will spend some time working out exactly what we will need for the talk show overnight and tomorrow we will be working on this again.

Socials: Parts of the Buffalo

I read a passage from a book today about how the First Nations of the plains used every part of the Buffalo after the hunt. Students listened to write down at least 10 things (many wrote more) that the Buffalo could be used for. We will be using this information in the next few lessons to talk about using our resources wisely. There was no homework for this lesson.

Poetry: Hexaduad Poems

Today we started Hexaduad Poems. A hexaduad poem consists of 6 duads (two lines that rhyme with each other). The students were allowed to pick any topic, provided it was a topic they hadn't used too much in the class already.

Rough copies of these poems are due tomorrow.

Math: Circumference

Today we finished up our work on circumference. Students were to finish questions 1-10 and reflect in their textbooks for homework - this is due tomorrow.