This Week At School

... Honestly, nothing too exciting happened this week at school.

Except that I took my grade 8's on their ski [day] trip.  

I went snowboarding for the first time ever and I'm already fully recovered (from my numerous falls and from my early wake up call - I got up at 5am so we could leave the city by 5:30am)

don't be fooled by the sunshine.  It was COLD

*On day 5's the middle school teachers can send their students to the computer lab over the lunch hour to get work done that just isn't getting done.  This week, I pretty much sent every single one of my grade 8's.  I actually felt super bad about it.  

The good news?  

I just finished putting in their marks and so far it looks like I'll only have to send 19 this week.  Huzzah!

Our report cards are due in a couple of weeks so I spent some time this weekend getting in some grades and starting writing my math comments (it's a start).  Hopefully no one does anything too drastic in the next couple of weeks so that I have to go in and change them.  Luckily, this report card season I'm not house hunting, buying a house, moving, packing, or getting broken up with (well... one can hope I don't start and end a relationship in the next 2 weeks - if I do I don't think I'll be too broken up about it ending).  BUT, you can expect a few less posts until spring break probably.

On Friday we had a professional development day and the guy who spoke to us was AMAZING.  Seriously, I could have listened to him all day. 

What did I get out of it?  

Hooks

I need to give my students a hook to get them interested in what we are doing... which I think I'll apply to my ELA classes.  

Right now, we are about to start writing and illustrating our comic books and I'm super excited for them to look amazing (hopefully).  While writing these comic books we are also to be working on our blogs (which are like on going journals).  The thing is, those blogs have pretty well died.  They have died and I need to resurrect them... Lazerus style.

SO... I spent last night googling and Youtubing motivational, beautiful, and inspirational commercials.  My plan is to end the commercial right before you see the product placement and have them write a blog post on what they think the tag line could mean.  Our speaker gave us an example and naturally I have no idea what the commercial is anymore. Grr...

I'm not planning to show them one this week - because I already gave them the great idea of writing about the ski [day] trip.

But next week... next week we will be watching this commercial 

(I think - I'm actually torn between 2 Sony Brovia commercials right now)

But I prefer this one

1) because I love the song (Jose Gonzales - Heartbeats)

2)  It's a beautiful commercial

3)  There is a message right before the product placement 

* FYI we have a 6 day school cycle here (and likely across Canada).  I believe it is so that if you miss school because of a holiday or an admin day you aren't always missing your Monday/Friday classes (because let's face it... holidays generally fall on Monday's and Friday's).  When we get to university then it changes to a 5 day cycle where we just go by the days of the week.