This Week At School

-  Was a full week!... for reals we haven't had to work a full 5 days for a very long time (no snow days this week)

-  In MATH we are full steam ahead with multiplication and can you believe it.. I've had multiple kids come up and tell me they are liking math.  I'm flabbergasted.  The student that I was really worried about not getting it is getting it amazingly and my students on another program who have been working adding and subtracting up until now are also doing a slower multiplication program.  We are all multiplying and it feels great!

-  We are double timing it in ART class.  Working on Valentine's Day art projects (which I feel like I botched the instructions on.... hopefully they still turn out okay) and a movement piece for later on (we started the movement piece weeks ago, then had a bunch of snow days and a pipeline explosion so it is just on hold until after Valentine's Day).  Stay tuned for instructions on both of our projects!

-  Friday's are Olympic day in math class.  Yesterday I showed them a chart of the medal counts from the Winter Olympics four years ago and based on that we predicted what we thought the medal counts would be for this year (For Canada, USA, Germany, Russia, and China - they picked the countries... okay I made them pick Canada, USA, and Russia).  We are working on creating a pictograph on our outside bulletin board for the medal count and in the classroom we will work on bar graphs for the medal counts (which will eventually turn into a computer lesson to create the graph in Excel).  Stay tuned for a picture of our bulletin board!

-  Speaking of COMPUTER CLASS, we are finally doing more than just All The Right Type and free time!  This week we worked on using word art in Word to create name tags for our desks (I made them remove their old ones because some had multiplication charts on them).  

-  In SCIENCE we watched for a shadow for at least a week to appear on a certain tree in the school yard.  But alas, it has been cloudy (naturally, the sun would come out after we did the lesson inside rather than outside).  In case you are ever having a very gloomy week and want to teach your students about shadows I found a great website to hep teach kids about shadow lengths!  First we predicted what we thought shadows looked like throughout the day and then we went through the website.  Afterwards they had a worksheet to do to show where a shadow would come from a tree at different times... some got it, some didn't take their time and all the shadow lengths looked the same, some drew their shadows coming from random places.  I think we will go back and look at it next again next science class.  For the record, it got sunny the day after the lesson and my students have been OBSESSED with checking its shadow and counting how many steps long it is at different times.

-  In FRENCH we are doing I Love To Read Month.  We went through one really easy book and then we went through a book about a groups favourite games.  I've told my class to try to remember what it was like when they were learning to read English. What did they do to try to figure out what was going on in the story?  So we've been looking at pictures and recognizing words that they've already learned.  I must admit they have a much better memory than I originally thought!  I also introduced the word "Nous" this week which refers to a group of people.  I even stuck up a new poster on the wall that I thought showed this best. Since we were talking about Nous I figured may as well tell them about Je, Tu, Il, Elle, Vous, Ils, and Elles as well.  They already knew about Je and a little about Tu, Il, and Elle.  Every day 1 we head to the library to do an online program to just reinforce what they are learning in the classroom.  They are pretty into it which is great (and one less day I have to plan something for!)

-  Haven't had much ELA this week since my lovely grade 8's are doing a DARE program.  On Friday when I supervised they watched a couple of videos and one talked a little about plagiarism... so happy for this since some of my students are definitely plagiarizing on their blogs and apparently me telling them they could get in serious trouble later on if they make that a habit isn't enough for them to stop.  Hopefully they get it now.  

-  I've been having trouble with getting my 8's to hand stuff in.  This week I'm trying something new... we've been writing short stories and I should definitely have more handed in than what I currently do so anyone who hasn't handed in their first story we did (on an inanimate object) by Monday gets to spend their next day 5 (so Thursday) lunch hour in the computer room working on getting it done.  Next week it will be anyone who hasn't handed in story #2 and posted an article review.  The following week their third story.  It pushed at least one of my students to get their work handed in sooner.  Not sure what to do in grade 4 with this.  I only send homework in math and only when they don't do well on their hand in question... I definitely have some that need the extra practice and I'm worried about report card time...

Apparently it has been a busy week!

Here are some lovely photos of our week at school....

We watched some Olympic snowboarding on Thursday in French class because I was missing half my class (for the record we started out watching about Festival du Voyegeur).  It was just the qualifiers but one guy fell... the response in the classroom was shock and then someone said "well, at least he made it to the Olympics" we also watched parts of the opening ceremonies on Friday at different times.  My grade 4's watched it at lunch.

Pop Art Snowflakes ours didn't turn out as well as the originals on the site.

Our Valentine's art

The beginnings of our movement pieces... I am well aware they look like nothing special right now

I got to school REALLY early yesterday morning to take some of these pictures, get old stuff off bulletin boards and get grades into my computer.