Thursday April 24th

Reminders
Satisfaction survey letters for parents went home today for grades 4 and 7. This code will give you the opportunity to complete the survey on - line.
The grades 4 and 7 students will be completing their surveys in the lab tomorrow.
Please be sure to return the dietary information for Evans Lake - we are fortunate that they are so accommodating of many dietary concerns.
Nurse was here today for the grade six vaccinations so if there a some complaints of sore arms or wooziness this might explain why!

Our day
We used the first part of the day to look at Environment and Resource Canada websites and consider the number of recent (small) earthquakes around the province and then in Canada in general. It is very interesting to see the same places (one of them is Sandspit, B.C.) come up multiple times.

This led to a quick look at the ocean floors and the types of plates that we are literally next door to and about earthquake preparedness. I am very careful not to encourage mass panic or scare anyone. The point today was to share the contents of the class emergency kit and encourage the students who have no 'comfort kits' to think about bringing one even in their backpacks. That is a tall order in April but you just never know.
Are we prepared? Are you? Can we ever really be prepared?

Novel time before band class many students are completing the reading of their novels now and are working on the related activities that are creative in nature rather than a set of questions. The activities require students to summarize their understanding of the novel in unique ways.

Band class

A moment of silence please for the demise of the 50 year old blackboards that today were put to rest. RIP blackboards (actually they were green!)
Today during the band class the maintenance men (Paul and Kevin) installed two brand new white boards - that are bright and they will take a bit of getting used to but no more chalk dust and board warping off the wall! It looks different but a good different - now need to figure out what to do with the chalk!!

Math 7 groups today for the first time since spring break! In each group we reviewed equivalent fractions, adding and subtracting with differing denominators. The dispersing of the three groups gave a perfect opportunity for breaking up the 'reluctant' learners from their usual places and I know more work was completed in the small groups today than in the whole group yesterday.

This time of year it is very interesting to see the students become so disinterested in the routines and expectations of the elementary school that issues come up that were never a problem before - they start to question and to push back. In some cases it is anxiety of the changes to come and for some others the boldness comes from a voice in their head that says...."well, what are they gonna do anyway?"

It is an occupational hazard with the senior elementary students.

Read to self

science mystery powders lab
In sets of three students tested each of 5 mystery powders to see their reactions to water, vinegar and iodine to determine if their were any clues that could lead to accurate identification of the powders.

Getting everyone to wear safety goggles correctly was interesting! That took longer than expected!

Despite the preparation of resources and materials (over the last two days) there were spills, wrecked experiments and some silliness that meant that a number of table (desk) covers had to be trashed because of the mess with iodine and some over watered Petrie dishes. I did not anticipate having to explain how to use a dropper for a drop or two of water and before we knew it a number of the powder mounds were flooded with too much water making the data observation rather challenging.
However, despite the setbacks and the difficulty with directions (excitement perhaps?) we managed to work our way through enough of the data sheet that we were able to narrow down the starch based powder (using reaction to iodine) and from there determine at least two more from their reaction to vinegar.
One was plaster of Paris which was supposed to 'set' if the correct amount of water was used - instead it had to be chipped off after school once the excess water was drained !!
Clean up ? Well, they tried.

The lab itself took an hour and the last part of the day gave us a chance to complete the data
observation section together - tomorrow we will review the questions and determine the learning from the lab and the hands on part. I am usually pleasantly surprised by the thinking after the action!!

As you can imagine by the end of the afternoon trying to nail jelly to the wall was becoming more difficult. Sometimes appealing to their better judgement is all it takes to settle things down. It is funny now some students have a difficult time with structure and others lack of structure - it is finding the balance is tricky.
We all survived to complete the lab questions another day (more later - I bet you can't wait!!)
Me neither...

Nighty, night
Mrs. J.