Monday, November 18th

Well, I would have to say that I am glad today is over - I have no idea what it is or was (full moon perhaps? in the sky that is!!) but today the students were generally challenging to teach and work with. Mondays are usually trying as we are getting the week going but today was out of left field challenging. Many of the peer-peer behaviours caused a great deal of interruption to our day.

Solutions:

new seating plan tonight for tomorrow
no groups- back to pairs
I have asked the students to go home, think about their responsibilty to their own learning and the general classroom environment and to plan on having a more pleasant day tomorrow


Reminders
Spelling Unit 8 and challenge 4 for Thursday
no new homework but some science is still MIA

Our Day

Phys. Ed. Badminton in half gym and volleyball in other half

Spelling Unit 7 challenge 3 return
Prep Unit 8 vocabulary
Challenge 4 is D words this week
Parts of Speech crossword puzzle

Math 7
conversions of percentage to decimal to fraction and back
teaching the how to using our first term knowlegde of multiplying and dividing decimals. Also allowing calculator use for checking and knowing if fractions are reduced as low as they can be.
Callenging class: some students are choosing not to help themselves but would rather entertain their peers!!

Read to Self
record- I ask them to record every day and many simply ingnore the direction!!


Social Studies
Archaeology and features of civilization
pre-lesson discussion on the major features of civilized culture (the students managed to find most of them just in their general knowledge 'bank')
Reading to answer the question...
How do we know what we know about early civilization?

Activity (group) piecing together an 'artifact' - collaborating as an archaelogist might to organize the pieces of artifact (as some were being 'stolen' and bartered for by black market thieves)
They listened to Walk Like an Egyptian in the closing minutes of the activity- they did not do too badly but I would have to say the 'wheels' were coming off the collaborative 'goodwill' at this time in the afternoon.

Tried to wrap up the group activity hoping they might take some learning from it about archaeology and ancient civilization.

Used our How is the Weather chart (from personal planning) to make an effort to get everyone calm and 'chill' for the last part of the day.

This year both grade six and sevens are headed to Middle school next fall so we talked about five things that might make it easier for them to make new friends and enjoy learning (and maybe get them to understand that we need to start practicing them now). This is what they came up with....like I said before they know what to say just maybe need more practice actually doing them?????

Anyway I was impressed...

1. self control (self regulation)
2. take own responsibility for learning and behaviour
3. cooperate and collaborate with others
4. believe in your self and your skills (be positive)
5. learn to self advocate with peers and adults alike

cool, huh? So why are they being so imaptient and rude to each other (and me)?

Finished reading aloud Chapter 19 of Word Nerd (finally) and I must say the students seemed happy just to listen to the story- quietly :)

Thank-you to the students who stayed back to apologize after school- I appreciate you taking time to do that- let's just put it down to a 'bad day' and start again in a better frame of mind tomorrow. Thanks.

Have a decent Monday night.
Until tomorrow
Mrs. J.