This MONTH At School

Probably more like 2 months. 

A thousand apologies... I just really needed some ME time and then I got sick over the break and blah blah blah excuse, excuse, excuse.  

The important thing is:  I'm back!

What have we been up to since coming back from Christmas break?

-  In Science we have started our unit on light and I am SO into it!  The kids are too!  We do lots of investigations and playing with flashlights and turning out our classroom lights.  It's been a lot of fun.

-  In math we are finishing up subtracting.  I'm still not super into math.  HOPEFULLY, we will get through multiplication and division with a minimal amount of heart attacks in the next month and get to move onto something a little more fun and creative and hands on.

-  We also started doing "daily math".  I had started them on it in September probably but they were having a really hard time with it.  I found something a little easier (it even involves some multiplication and division) and we are doing okay with it.

-  In art we did some work with pop art and snowflakes (I forgot to take a picture... watch for it next week).

-  In health we did some cooperative games (watch for a blog post on the 3 things we tried)

-  In grade 8 ELA we started a short story/comic unit!  Some of them are super into it.  I'm even throwing in some fairytales!  (watch for some lessons on these as well)

-  Some of those grade 8 students are really getting into the blogs!  

-  We are working on our editing skills.  Pulling out dictionaries and thesaureses and devoting actual time to editing.  I hope they are getting it.

-  In French we are starting to speak French in French class.  What a concept!  I'm teaching them basic phrases and words and am making them ask to go to the bathroom in French.  It's a start.

AND... here are some photos from the last couple of months (again, a thousand apologies)

I planned a Christmas party for my grades 8.  Basically I had them play that game where you take turns trying to unwrap a present with oven mitts on.  There were boxes within boxes and about a bazillion layers of newspaper and tape.  The present?  A pencil.  Then we started watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", ate food, and went sledding.

We did some 3-D fish art forever ago 

It's hard to tell but these are ornaments on a Christmas tree - we used pastels for the tree branches and water colour for the ornaments)

Water colour and tissue paper/stained glass trees.  I loved how these turned out!  And I love how creative they got with them!

Work in progress.  It's hard to tell but it is the French alphabet which is exactly like the English alphabet except the letters sound different.  They were supposed to write the letter sounds on the page if they were different from the English sound.

2nd snow day = a day to do some art!  What do you think?


Art projects coming up:
- a piece on movement
- a "we are dreaming of warmer weather" piece
- something to do with valentine's day!

LINKS:
3D Fish Art
Stained Glass Trees