I do hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving weekend. Sometimes holiday weekends can be busy with travel so it is always nice to have that extra day.
Homework and Reminders
Math 7- if not completed in class, finish the practice work on placing the decimal point in the answers on the worksheet (there are only about 6 or 8 examples left to try- we did the rest in class!)
Math 6 - complete the t-chart new worksheet
Reader's Response - need to read up to the end of Ch 10 in the novel this week- if not reading it in school students will need to read at home (by the way, time in class is offered for that purpose every day)
Spelling test #3 next 12 words test on Thursday (or Friday if the students feel they need an extra day)
Reminders
T-shirt order forms went home with students today
Oct 12th Fire Drill tomorrow - Fire safety week
Oct 14th (Friday) Twins spirit day
Oct 20th picture day and Halloween Carnival at school in the evening
Grade sixes received their immunization forms today and are to return them by Oct 17th for pick up on the 18th
General Day
Return spelling test #2 and the redo tests for #1
(I'd like to encourage students to make the effort to improve any assessments that they feel that they can do a better job on but there really has to be an intention to improve). Redoing a test is a committment to studying both sets of words.
Analyze the words for this week's spelling test #3 (I made a typo on the spelling test heading and it read Speeling Test - I offered the students a bonus for circling the error IF they found it - only ten found it!!
Spelling activity (speeling) was a wordsearch and all words were spelled correctly in the activity.
Editing Skills- on the site of Education World, they have a set of paragraphs prepared with errors in COPS (capitalization, omissions, punctuation, spelling and general grammar). Students read and try to find the 10 errors and fix them before we review them in class.
Novel- Reader's Response- Chapters 6-10. I read chapter 7 today and requested that the students read chapters 8-10 independently. I re-introduced the concept of the reader's response activity but I honestly am not too sure that the students understand it yet- just too many blank stares and non-commital nods so I guess I can only give them a chance to show me that they do 'get it' or I will have to 'back up the bus'!! Hard to tell right now.
For my parents, the idea of a reader's response is allowing the students to read a meaningful 'chunk' (5 chapters) of the novel or story and then asking them to make a personal response to the characters and the story plot connecting to what they liked or found confusing and/or discussing things that are important to them (the readers) and making connections to their own life or their own understanding of the novel. There are no wrong connections as long as we are reading the same novel!
It gets away from the 20 boring chapter questions that can sometimes ruin the enjoymwent of a novel for readers. A response is NOT a summary of what happened in the book but a personal opinion about what happened by the reader.
Hope that makes sense. Clear as mud?
Math 7
I returned the re-assessments for the first quiz and we improved from 60 to a 75% pass rate (fabulous) and our 'less than 10' rate dropped from 40 to 25%. That's a whole 15% difference!
So that made a significant difference and, even those who still struggled, the majority of students imroved their initial Quiz marks. This shows me that the majority with a little coaching and intetntion to improve CAN :) That is the good news. The difficulty comes in convincing students that a bit of study for a quiz is worth it and, truthfully, if that is the only thing I manage to teach some of my more stubborn 'non-studiers' this year then I will consider myself successful!! I can drag a horse to water but I can't make him/her drink!
Multiplying Decimals was the skill we are grappling with today - using knowlegde of basic multiplication skills and number of place value placements for whole and/or decimal numbers to place a decimal point accurately in an answer. We completed page two of the booklet that we started last week. I gave a heads up that there will be a Multiplying decimals quiz on Moday Oct 17th (next Monday). The content of the quiz will be the work we are currently doing in class.
Finally, we followed up the problem on the free hot chocolate for ski tickets numbered 100-800 whose digits added up to 8. The correct answer was 36.
This is a pattern problem which comes up time and again and once you know the trick to finding the pattern, it can be solved for different 'demominations'.
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
107 206 305 404 503 602 701
116 215 314 413 512 611 710
125 224 323 422 521 620
134 233 332 431 530
143 242 341 440
152 251 350
161 260
170
As you can see the pattern is one of diminishing returns which shows that for the 100's there are 8 possibilities one less for the 200's and so forth 7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 36
So if a new problem was to be formed asking the number of free sushi trays that would be given out if the digits on the coat check numbers #100-900 added up to 9, the pattern is instantly (maybe not!) retreivable and the answer would be 45 [36+9] we know for the digits of the tickets to add up to 8, there are 36 possibilities - the pattern for 9 would be 9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1= 45
Ta Da :)
Are you loving it yet?
Silent Reading
working on the silent part still!
French
I droned on about verbs and parallels between English and French (Spanish, Italian etc.) grammar today and the kids looked suitably impressed !! (Not) You know, pronouns and verbs, verb tenses and regular and irregular verbs... yadda..yadda
Excuse me are you falling asleep too? Stop it. I'm nearly done.
Anyway, I persevered and we tried our first translation of one of our daily French phrases from the board (every day I put up the date, weather and miscellaneous comments about the week making sure to introduce new vocabulary with the old favourites)
I did put the verb AVIOR on the board but I know at the moment it means nothing to the students until we start to do something with it- Thursday we'll do something with it, I hope!
Physical Education
Volleyball- pretty good- our work and time spent last week are paying dividends. We managed to get nearly a whole half hour on team skills in volleyball. Yeah for us.
Back in class after a quick analysis of the Phys. Ed. skills, we did a homework review and organization, t-shirt order forms went out to students, reminders of the coming week's events, decision about pumpkin carving for the Railway Heritgae park, clean up and prep for dismissal- bit chatty at the end of the day but we all survived!
Have a great evening- stay dry (rainfall warning)
Mrs. J.
P.S curling tonight (oh, boy!)
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