Monday, 1 October

Welcome to Month Two of the new school year.  Sorry this post is a bit late, but I've been fighting with my screen casting software as I attempt to record some math tutorials for the class.  I got it working, but the picture has flaws so there is more work to do.  This might be the first step in "flipping" the math classes.  You can check out this short video if you're curious as to what that might look like:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5zDUrkFac4

Here's an article from the Vancouver Sun http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=6bbd1aa7-3e52-4815-9d44-3c08074684ac

We started the day with some more penmanship instruction.  We've done a quarter of the letters and I'm starting to see some improvement with the care and accuracy students are giving their writing.  This is a preliminary step to my reviewing cursive writing, my preferred choice when using the interactive whiteboard.  Next, the students had band - there still seems to be issues with instruments and sheet music.

After recess I returned the math assessments we did last week and we began some review of the basics (something almost everyone in class showed they would benefit from doing).  We ended with some fun, reading BIG numbers.  I posed the following question: if the number place values to the left of a decimal are ones, tens, hundreds, etc; why do the numbers to the right of the decimal begin with tenths, not oneths?  We'll look at that tomorrow.

After lunch we had a discussion on empathy and how empathic behaviour affects out lives.  This was the springboard to our viewing the film Flowers for Algernon.  We stopped the film at a scene where bulling behaviour that was accepted by characters at the beginning of the story seemed to no longer be accepted.  The movie has some thematic connections to the novel Crash (that is to be finished in one week- today's only homework).  We ended the day with a game of three-corner soccer in the gym.  Congratulations to the blue team who got a shutout!