Election Day: Tuesday, 14 May

Today we reconnected with our French program.  We focused on the articles le, la, un, une.  We included the verb conjugation je suis.  Rather than learning a list of verb conjugations, we'll focus on a few vocabulary words and a few grammar terms at a time and use them to construct phrases.  I gave a short oral quiz at the end of the lesson.  Here are today's notes:

Visit Duolingo for a good web-based tutorial

My passion inquiry would involve
sailboats in some way.

Next, we went outside for a team relay race (to act as a brain break) and then I discussed the process for beginning a passion inquiry.  That inquiry will officially start on May 23.  We discussed the brainstorming process, but more importantly, we discussed the importance of "defining" what key words in a question mean. For example, it's ok to say that we are going to find out who had the best standard of living, but we need to define what "standard of living" means.  For example, will we include longevity (how old people lived to be) or number of hours of daily work, or whether or not people enjoyed long periods of peace with neighbouring countries?  Only after we know what we're measuring exactly, can we answer the question.

After recess we read for ten minutes and then started math.  In Math 7 we took a few minutes to review Lessons 6.1-6.2 and then we learned how to model equations with integers using integer tiles.  This is no different than the work we did previously with integers tiles, except now we've included the long rectangle to represent the variable (ex. x, n, y, etc.).  Please complete #1-2 for homework if you were unable to finish in class.  We'll complete the practice set tomorrow.  

The key to creating and then solving
the model is to "add tiles" to
create "zero pairs."

After lunch we read for ten more minutes and then began our civilizations inquiry work.  At 2:15 we stopped and went outside to get some exercise.  We met Mr. Pond's class in the forest and played a big game of posse.  Remind your parents to get out and vote.

We looked at ideas such as chocolate, coffee break, spa, tools, and smelly, but the students decided that they would like the theme of the class gift basket for the Spring Fling Dance fundraiser to be "KITCHEN."  Please use this post to add what you would like to donate so that others can see what has already been added (we want to avoid 28 cutting boards - it might make us look like our theme is firewood).