April 22, 2009

It's Earth Day and all the students were consciously thinking about ways to help conserve and preserve our environment. They asked about recycling and if we should shut the lights off and many of the older students helped with the Hurley Creek clean-up yesterday.
Second graders and one first grader worked on solving the "Mystery of the Missing Medal" today. Work on mysteries involves the solving of logic puzzles and some deductive thinking that is beneficial for mathematical reasoning and just creating new paths of thinking. We also started working on Amphibians, which is a unit the second grade classes are all studying , so I have tried to find challenging information to add to what they are already doing. Part of our discussion today included listening to various frog sounds, such as the American Bullfrog, the Pigfrog, the Carpenterfrog and others.
Seventh grade Math students are finishing a unit on using percentages, but today did a short study on their understanding of the concept of "mean" or average. This is a part of the Math Strategies class I will attend tomorrow to work on deepening Math understanding for students. As a class,we do focus a lot on discussing our Math concepts and working cooperatively on our Math assignments. The students are great at accepting challenges and also challenging themselves. If you are in the classroom you would see students constantly discussing , comparing and quite often disagreeing about the "how" and "why" of a problem.
A report on Reading will be coming up soon.
Some of the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders have been corresponding with students in other countries through an educational site called E-pals. Teachers from around the world post topics they are interested in having students discuss and , if we have common goals, we start a correspondence. We have heard often from students in Great Britain and Italy, and a few times from those in Norway. It is interesting to see how the students share many of the same interests in books, movies and music. Also, I corresponded with a Norwegian teacher that had many of the exact same concerns about education that you will hear in the U.S.
Off to a Math meeting tomorrow, but I'm sure we'll have something new to post by Friday !