This Week At School

This week at school was much the same as previous weeks.  

We did however manage to wrap up our playground projects and present them.  There were some very creative commercials showing off their hypothetical playgrounds.

We also managed to start our TUSC "unit".  My plan is to have them present once a cycle (we run on a 6 day cycle here so not quite once a week) which means we've got 6 TUSC meetings total.  Usually, I would run it all year and everyone in class would get to do a job once.  Since we only have 6 left I let them choose a bunch of jobs that they would like to have and I'm giving one based on that.  I did tell them that they would be getting 6 different jobs and because I know them a bit now I am being selective as to who gets what job because I just know some of these kids acting as chairperson would not run the meeting so well.  Anyways, we all have our first job selected and hopefully we'll all come to school on Wednesday prepared to participate!

From what I've heard we might be enjoying some lasagna and learning about Kijiji.

We're still reading Underground to Canada.  I had to give them a good talking to this week because some of them can't seem to sit quietly while being read to and it just gets super disruptive.  I've started sending those that are disruptive to the office to read the chapters on their own (usually it just means sending one there and the others get the message) and giving the rest of them something to work on while I read to keep them occupied.  We did end up having a good class on Friday and if all goes according to plan for Monday's class we will end our morning with a film about the Underground Railroad.

My plans for next week are to dig out my old debate unit and get things organized with that so that we can hopefully start that the following week.

And... I thought I would share a picture of my classroom

It's nothing really too special and I don't intend to bring things from home to jazz up the place like I usually do.  With only 2 months left of school left (and the fact that I actually don't teach out of that room all that often) I just don't think it's worth the effort this year.  But this is it... where I've been spending most of my time lately.

PS.  In case you haven't figured it out yet... my weekday posts are from a while ago that I've been saving up.  Luckily, when I got my term I had about a months worth of posts ready to go so I haven't actually had to do much writing... but they are quickly running out.  I am going to put in my best effort to keep up with the 3 times per week posting for as long as I can though... forgive me if it starts to dwindle to only a couple of posts a week soon.