This Week At School

(or perhaps a more appropriate title would be these last few weeks at school).

It's been a little crazy at the school these last few weeks (I believe the board said that we were down to only 13 school days this morning)... so it is time to wrap things up, get my assessments in order (for my grade 8's), and write those report cards.  But we've been trying to have some fun during all of this too.

-  In math we have powered right on through fractions, decimals, and money.  They were a synch after spending so much time on addition and subtraction at the beginning of the year for most of my students.  Right now we are looking at perimeter and area.  I'll post a link to a book we watched (yes, we just watched the youtube video of someone else reading the book) to learn about perimeter and area... it took us an entire hour to get through!  Wowzers!  But the kids were engaged the whole time!  Today to continue our investigations of area and perimeter I had them draw out their names on graph paper.  Then they had to count all the edges of the letters in their names and the squares each letter used to come up with the area and perimeter of their name.  They were so confused that I was letting them colour and draw in math class - we work really hard in math class (often doing the work out of the textbook).

-  In science we have been studying rocks and minerals.  I think my favourite part of this unit has been teaching about erosion.  We've gone out to the sandbox twice now to build mountains and dump water on them to see what would happen.  Then I had them come up with a plan of how to get their mountain to "weather the storm" so to speak.  After they came up with some ideas on their own we watched a Bill Nye video on it (one that I did not preview) and I was so impressed that many of things Bill Nye went over in the video we had already talked about and learned (I'll give myself a pat on the back for this later).  Then today I took them back out to the sandbox to reattempt building a mountain that would last.  We had a lot of fun.

-  On our way back in from the sandbox the kids pretended their waterbottles were wands and multiple students bopped me on the head to tell me I had their permission to get married tomorrow (Saturday).  Erm... thanks guys... I hope they are providing me with a guy to marry as well!

-  We did some folk art in art class (I'll post pictures sometime) and we have the supplies for Fathers Day sitting under the sink ready to go!  I even created a poem for the Father's Day presents... 

what's that?  I need another pat on my back?  Well... if you insist.

-  French is pretty much done.  I've got them counting to 50 and they know their school supplies and what to call common classroom objects (although, I don't think a VCR or cassette player are common classroom objects anymore).

-  ELA is finished.  We somehow survived poetry!  We started our assessments early and they are busy looking at newspapers.

-  All that's really left is to write these fabulous report card comments (hopefully I'll get all but my 8th graders done tomorrow), survive assessments, and figure out what I want to order for my classroom for next year (I discovered the black and white pages AND turquoise stuff in one of the catelogues already).

No pictures today but here is the video of the book we used in math class to learn about perimeter and area...  I paused it a lot during the reading so my students could come up with their own table arrangements.