Tuesday November 8th

Another speeding bullet of a day.......I swear the days seem to get faster after the time change for Daylight Savings! Why are we still doing that anyway?

Homework
Math 7 complete p.2 of the booklet for Order of Operations - by all means try page 3 (we will be covering it tomorrow just try a few)
Math 6 students have a study guide for a math quiz to practice
Reader Response # 3 Ch 16-20 (at least have the written ready to word process at computers or hand write it!)
Any INC art - not much more class time for Name Acrostcs and Halloween posters/houses- please complete in own time at home or...

Reminders
Remembrance Day practice for speech parts Nic, Teresa, Autumn and Eric (no need to memorize just read for smooth delivery)
Quest U. students will be visiting and running a guest Phys. Ed. class with the students tomorrow afternoon
Remembrance Day Assembly Thursday
Stat Holiday to commemorate Remembrance Day this Friday- no school
Photo package orders due on Thursday if interested

General Day
We welcomed Hannah's new puppy Otis to our classroom first thing today - he was understandably a little scared of all the faces (hey, I sometimes feeel that way too first thing in the morning!! LOL) He is so cute and had the neatest markings- we will watch his progress throughout the year- maybe he'll be our class mascot :)

Daily French (fresh snow on the mountains :))

Spelling practice

Novel time: introduced the final project for the novel- no more reader response- no more questions but a creative written and/or design project- there will be 10 different possibilites for students and they will be requested to chose two of them. Today I showed examples and we played a round of Jeopardy from a former student's project. The students will all receive a list and expalnation of expectations- we will create a rubric for quality once the reading of the last 12 chapter is complete.
Some possibilities: game board, Jeopardy with 4 or 5 catergories, sound track, sales and advertising poster, character depiction (various artistic formats), create an epilogue or prologue for the story, ABC summary poster, research the author's other work are some examples.
We read chapters 21 and 22 today and we all became VERY animated when there was a romantic KISS of the characters of Lizzie and Alex (the novel was leading up to 'the kiss' with everything except the romantic music playing in the background- come to think of it now, I could have provided it (lost opportunity).

It was amusing to see all the different reactions to the written description of a first kiss. That's why I love what I do. I also love that these students enjoy being read to :) It gives me an opportunity to 'ham it up' a little. I stopped reading at one point and exclaimed "KISS HER ALREADY" - you should have seen the students faces!!! Priceless...

Math 7 collected the division work I asked to be completed at home. We did an update of the index and a look at the Learning Outcomes for term 1 that we have covered and I am happy to report that we have three learning outcomes left in Term 1 to cover in the next three weeks. It is hard to believe we have covered all the other outcomes since September (there were 12 and we have covered 9).
I distributed a review booklet with a VIP (Visual Instruction Plan which lays out the steps of BEDMAS and provides students with several examples) and we worked on practice and correction of error- the main error seems to be the "left to right" appearance of the arithmetic functions- doing the correct procedure first. The students seem to be doing well on it so far. After a few practice examples and sorting out the order errors- they are good to go.

Silent reading- once settled, the students read well
This time is SO important to everyone and is a stress free method of balancing the lunch time activity with a calming chance for the brain to re-focus.

Thank-you to Kelli, Jack, Brody and Rowan for making a beautiful and collaborative effort on the Remembrance Day bulletin Board. It looks impressive.
Thank-you to Ethan and Arsh for working so dilligently on our class wreath and for all the neat colouring and cutting of theose individual poppies.

French quick preview of where we are headed with French (FSL)- now that we have had a term of vocabulary and 'high frequency' phrases and games, we will be starting into a couple of different programs (Salut, mes amis) which will hopefully provide opportunity for bringing language, culture and spoken French more into focus. I showed the students the resources today- they seemed to be kind of following !!!

Phys Ed. Volleyball. Things were fine - still a few crazy wild balls flying overhead but generally much better than in late September (but I am personally tiring of volleyball skills- time to move on!!!)

I provided the general class some completion time (Art projects, reader response, math etc.) after we were back in class- everyone had something to work on while we listened to the readers for the Assembly on Thursday read their part of the speeches for the first time- they are taking home their parts tonight and will hopefully read them over and practice. Thanks to Autumn, Eric, Nic and Teresa and to Kelli for time keeping. Each part is approx. under a minute so by timing we can tell if the reading was to slow or too fast. We worked on 'pitch' and tomorrow we will have another 'dry run'.

That was our day- some days I feel like we hardly get anything done but when I reflect on the day it is busy and productive for the most part. Have a fabulous evening - I have a culring game at 7pm- gotta run.
See you tomorrow.
 Mrs. J.