Wednesday June 10th

What a difference a day makes :)

Happy to report we all had a much more amicable day today and I can't tell you how relieved I was. I ENJOYED my day and I think many students did too :) YEAH

I did change the seating arrangement and there were four absent to start the day BUT I flipped math to the front of the day and did language arts second and it seemed to work for today anyway (either that or no one was really awake for math!!) We managed to finish a look at patterns and breaking down multiple step problems to smaller 'bites' when dealing with area and perimeter- our observation was that quadrilaterals with similar perimeters can have different dimensions and all have different areas.
I always love it when my students show me new ways to look at problems- for example where I saw 4 congruent triangles in a stop sign that we had to find the area of, they saw 2 congruent larger triangles. Perspective and patterns are so important for solving any kind of problem not just math. Great observations. Did you realize that a hexagon split in half is two trapezoids?

Last day tomorrow for Vocab-u-lous and I was impressed today as students started assisting each other so they could get 'caught up' or at least through another letter. Approximately 10 students managed to get through the letter 'Z' today !! What's not to like? (Yes, some are riding coat-tails but...they are powering through the assignment)

The multi-coloured banner for sportsday was painted up today- all hands on deck. The sports teams were posted in the foyer today (or as our new vocabulary would have us call it : the 'vestibule') There seems to be some excitement brewing for Friday. You gotta love sports day!!

Jackie completed a fantastic review with our class in a form of team Jeopardy and we were both truly impressed at the team-work that took place during the session- of course, food was involved and everybody was recognized but the big difference for the winning team (which came from behind) wasn't so much what they knew but how they played the game together. It was one of the best reviews for personal planning that we have done this term.

Physical Ed. was next and everyone seemed to enjoy getting outside again. We finished chpter 11 of the novel and ended the day with 40 minutes of a class choice of movie Twilight - the movie that is based on the popular teen novel series (vampire teenagers!!) At least they majority were quiet through this movie (unlike Dragonheart).

Tomorow is the last day for asignments before reports this weekend. I have asked those who will (!!) to complete or at least get started on a socials 'article' or feature about an Ancient Roman topic of their interest. Realitically, I have resigned myself to offering a socials mark BONUS for term three for the students who manage to do this. Thank you to the three students who turned in some very fine features/articles today- very inspiring. Your diligence is appreciated.

Tomorrow Mrs. Parker will be teaching the grade seven team leaders the station procedures for sports day. Have a good evening. By the way, the classroom computer was taken away today by the tech man- I had to laugh- he said it had "lost its mind and couldn't find its hard drive" and I thought that was so much like me at this time of the year- I need a new hard drive!!! LOL
Anyway, its gone to computer heaven and I am still doing Blogs at home- that's my excuse about why they are so late. Until tomorrow folks- who knows what tomorrow holds :)