February 17, 2011

Today in English class we presented our stories so far. I was hoping for the students to provide some feedback to their peers, but this did not happen too much, Sean and Rachael were able to add some comments. I was able to give some suggestions. I hope students take these on-board and use these to write a second draft. Some students are able to write more complex stories than others, with Vivian and Liz doing good work, Stephanie, Grace and Ruby are writing complex stories as well, but it is taking them a long time to get the words down. Rachael enjoys this exercise, Jonathan does well, but needs time to think, and Sean continues to show his reflective abilities by decided to write a new story. Belle surprises me with the way she tries to do well.

In our UOI class, we started to work on the title of our unit, "A Sense of Place" and the students are making a poster about their favourite place. As the unit progresses some students may be able to take this up as a project (either a poster with information, or a presentation). Table B show good negotiation skills when the girls wanted to do a house, and the boys wanted to do a park. I told them they needed to persuade the others. Instead they reached a compromise, and decided to do a Park House.

We also had Jane, a Korean from 6R come to answer students questions. The students enjoyed asking her questions and documenting the answers. I think they like learning how to say things in Korean, especially as Chris is from Korea. They asked Jane to ask Chris some things. We will need to do some reflection about Jane's talk in our next class, we also need to do some preparation for the email and survey to Japan (it was good to see that Joy asked when we were going to do that, THAT'S PROGRESS!

In math class we continued working on timelines. I overestimated their abilities. Last class we did a timeline without any instruction, and the class did very well, so I thought this time I would just need some minor instruction, however I found that the students had trouble accurately representing time on the timeline. Next time we will need explicit instruction on how to represent time on the timeline.