Monday, April 15th

Monday...another week...
I finally had the root canal procedure on Saturday and hope I never have to have another. Of course it wasn't as simple as a root canal should be; according to my dentist, my tooth had two roots one dead and one very much alive and not straightforward as I guess it was a 'funky chicken' kind of root that meandered all over and so in the middle of the procedure the dentist had to do another x-ray to figure out where the root took off to!! Anyway, my mouth is still recovering but here I am trying to make the best of things.

Homework
Math 7 complete the two remaining problems for the finding missing angles activity from class today
read those novels

Reminders
Thursday open house come visit between 3 and 6pm. See out art in the gym and check out the Scholastic books available for purchase in out library.
Wednesday math tutor session (3:15-4pm) will be focusing on Adding and Subtracting integers this week- if you were at the last session please hand in your booklet so I can determine if we need more time on algebra.

Our day...
I was on duty this morning and it was cold!!

daily French

Novel reading and writing time

Poetry: today another one of my favourite 'oldie but goodie'
Alden Nowlan's Greatness
Had the students think about their talents and what they would like to be known for one day. We read Mr. Nolan's poem and discussed the simplicity of the form. He states about how he could be the greatest poet in the world if only he would be able to make people see the images his words create on a blank page. Then he gives three simple and effective images: sunlight, a sparrow and three pieces of popcorn spilled on the snow.

It is such an easy form to re-create and I had a few already completed samples from past classes that I was able to share. Tomorrow the students will consider the notes they took about the poem and form today and they will create their own Greatness poems.

Math7 Geometry
We followed up last Friday's 'find the missing angles' examples and completed another four together on the board. I think most of the students have the format down now by using the known relationships and the add and subtract from 180 to complete the missing angles activities. Some were challenging but we were able to work out the angles needed by working strategically through the 'what we know' angles first.
For homework I challenged them to a problem solving activity that actually gave me some trouble because I didn't look at it correctly when I first tried it!! I have asked them to try to solve the missing angles for the problems for tomorrow's class. We agreed to have a review of the unit on Wednesday.
Reviewing: parallel lines and patterns/relationships, classifying angles and triangles, calculating the missing angles.

Silent reading

science
Discussed variables, measuring out accurately and hypothesis before we started to try the
dancing raisins experiment
unfortunately the raisins took so long to dance at all that the students became a little restless
The idea is that CO2 created by baking soda and vinegar form effervescence that attaches to the raisins and has them rise up to the top and back down to the bottom of the container once they break the surface and oxygen is introduces! Some worked but I think the raisins used were actually a bit too old to do any dancing- I didn't think about that variable. Gotta love science...

Scholastic peek preview in the school library- a nice break from class had us down having a look at the sample books available from the Scholastic Fair open over the next few days.

Back in class I tried valiantly to have the students work through the after activity for the science experiment. We managed to work through one side of the Lab report and will complete the rest tomorrow.

Where did the day go?
Thanks to Kim for her help in the afternoon class and with the clean up.

Have a good evening.
Mrs. J