Thursday, November 24th

Some days I feel that I need things to be much quieter and calmer than they are in reality.
I feel that our students need to find a quiet and calm space just to give their overwhelmed brains a chance to think things over- early dismissal days aren't those kind of days!!!
Things seems so hectic, noisy and interrupted that I get flustered.

Thank you to parents who called and took the time to come in to see me- if there are others who would like to do the same but didn't have time to fit it in this week, please feel free to contact me , e-mail or call and we can set up a time for a meeting.

Homework
none for tomorrow!!
the grade sevens have a MATH Quiz on Monday but they have practice work for that and I'd suggest they do it on the weekend

Reminders
Friday volleyball tournament after school
Friday night movie night at the school

General Day
we started the day with a LOCK-Down drill - the students did a great job and we talked about the need for such drills. There was a recent incident in Surrey that my students knew about.

Read as promised chapter 1 of ,Word Nerd, we didn't get finished at the end of the day yesterday and guess what...
my students begged for another chapter and didn't even want to hear the other contending novel so I obliged and we started our day with the students listening to the story of Ambrose, a grade seven studnet in Vancouver, whose allergic reaction to peanuts landed him in hospital. More tomorrow.

Spelling Test #8 everyone was here today so I don't need to remember to redo the test on another day :) Yeah!

Novel work time on the projects and a reminder about the socials research projects for which I would like students to make decisions (10-10:30 am at computers)
Gr 6 will be researching a modern day counrtry
Gr 7 will be reasarching an ancient civilization (ancient river civilizations) NOT including Greece and Rome at this time, however.
Computer time until morning break

Math 7
Today was a review day for the Quiz #4 (as requested)
The students now know what is on the actual quiz and everyone was given another worksheet to practice the ones we didn't do together for their own study on the weekend. The concepts are on Order of Operations and conversion from decimal to fraction to %
We did some examples and review together - I was getting a bit impatient with some of the students who were more interested in interacting with each other than with the math concepts!!
Hopefully, they will all study for the Quiz Monday. I challenged them to NOT need a redo test for quiz 4!!
I asked the students to consider where their energy is going during class and asked them to be more mindful about where and how they're working on math skills!
Charlie Brown's teacher: " Blah Blah Blah,  Balh Blah" cue piano music

Silent reading
two students asked if they could read the novel, Word Nerd, but I want to keep it for reading aloud!!

Again with the short day- I encouraged students to work during the silent reading time reading OR on activities that they needed to get completed including novel , science and math.

Personal Planning - we finished our day with a quick look at p40 in the Teenage Survival Guide which is a brief passage (three paragraphs) about nutrition, activity and sleep. Sleep is one of the biggest issues that can cause teenagers to underperform at school and generally simply because they are too tired. Lack of sleep affects their focus and ability to learn. It is recommended that this age level gets 8-10 hours of sleep a night (and not all on the weekend) . It is a topic we need to do a bit more work on because before we knew it,  it was 2pm!!
I have an interesting article about sleep that I published on this Blog a while ago. I'll see if I can locate it and post it again.

Early Dismissal. Have some parents to meet. See everyone tomorrow.
Mrs. J.