March 23, 2012

Another week down and only one week to go before spring break! But it's not like anyone, especially me, is counting. Oh no, I'm not counting down to spring break. In fact, I'm counting down until two days before spring break. My wife and I are leaving town, the state, even the country, and taking an adventure to Holland, so I'm taking a couple days before and a couple of days after to enjoy 10 days on a completely different continent. I can't wait! This will be my first trek off American soil.

I suppose I can make mention now as to why I chose to post the science fair picture I did. Isaac earned third place according to the judges score sheets! He put together a miniature sized marble roller coaster using words that, as Mrs. Dezember says, she hadn't seen since college. Max was also awarded the Most Creative project. He went around to local businesses and such measuring himself on the height things they have by the doors to show the descrepency between the way different places have measured. Congratulations to the both of you!

As for the classroom, I have a few pictures to share. The first is a picture of a couple of our personal crests. We started by drawing a shield and then divided it into four sections. One section represents our past, one represents our present, one the future, and the last is a dream we have. A few of them are pictured below:
The other two pictures I have come from this week's DARE session. Officer Penrod is known for handing out what he calls swag. It's little prizes he can use to reward the students. The first picture comes a contest that he orchestrated. He had a Robin Yount autographed baseball. He challenged the students to come up with some form of report telling about Robin Yount and left it at that. How far the students took it was up to them. One of our students took it about as far as you can, and for that, he was rewarded the baseball:
The final picture came from one of our students returning the favor to Officer Penrod. He's always handing out swag, so she figured it was his turn to receive some. He had said earlier in the year that two of his favorite things in the world were steak and donuts and if someone could find a way to combine them, he would be in heaven. So that's what she did, combined a steak and a donut for him! Pure awesomeness!
Beyond this, things are moving along as normal. End of levels are getting closer and closer. The students will need to decide their country for their country report by Tuesday this week. I will have a sub the last two days of this coming week, and the first two days back. Also, be sure they're keeping their book report in mind. I think that's about all. I can almost guarantee I will not have another blog until after spring break, so enjoy the vacation! I hope you all have something fun planned!

"A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you've been taking." ~Earl Wilson (and I think we're all due for a good one!)

March 19, 2012

Happy Spring! The spring equinox is almost upon us. Tomorrow is one of two days of the year where we have exactly the same amount of day light as we do night. It also indicates the first official day of spring. So celebrate! Hopefully the snow is gone so it actually feels like spring again. Here's our homework board from this last week:
A lot has gone on in the past few weeks. Two weeks ago we had the science fair. Can I say "successful"? I was so impressed by the projects that were brought in. The students did a fantastic job using their scientific brains to pull together projects. I would love to put every picture I took up, but I'm not sure the page would load very well, so I'm going to narrow it down to just one, which is hard, but I've done it:
I have my reasoning for choosing this picture. I'm not sure how much information I can release, though, so I'm best not saying anything yet.

Another project we've been working on is our DARE box. Every year, Officer Penrod gives the a task of designing a box that the students can put questions for him into. Previous years we've designed things such as a giant donut and a vending maching. This year he put a spin on it by asking us to work together with a class to design the box, so we had 54 students working on one box. It's quite a task to get that many ideas into one box, but I think we pulled it together. With just guidance from Mrs. McGuire and myself, the kids built this box, and I must say, I'm pretty proud of it:
Great work on this kids!

If you've asked your kids what's been going on in math this week, I'm sure you've gotten grumbles for an answer because we've taken tests all week long. I have officially taught everything within the common core (as far as I know at least), so this week I gave tests to see how much they remembered. I used the data from those tests to find out which material would be best to recover between now and end of level testing. I now know what I will teaching between now and April 30th.

We also had book reports presented this week. We have one more book report coming up in the middle of April, a little more than a month away. It's another thing I wanted to make sure I got in before end of levels so they had one less thing to worry about during testing. Here's the schedule for the presentation of those:
I've put a bug into the students ears to get them thinking. Our final big writing project for the end of the year is going to be a country report. There will be a couple of artistic aspects to it as well as a written report. It will be a very guided project that, honestly, should they put effort into it, should be able to completely finished here at school. I will be giving them time to research, type, draw, everything, so as long as they use their time wisely, it shouldn't be difficult. As I said, though, for now, I've just put the thought of it in their minds so they can start thinking about what country they want to do. I've put just one limitation on it, they cannot do the United States. I have, however, challenged them to leave North America and try to do any country besides Canada or Mexico.

I think that about covers everything that's been going on recently. Remember, the end of the term is this week. Unless previous arrangements were made, I have stop accepting assignments for third term. Anything from here on out will go on fourth term grades, which I will hopefully have started in the gradebook by Friday. I'm not entirely sure what day the school plans on sending home report cards. When I know more information, I'll let you know. I guess the big thing to look forward to at this point is spring break, April 2-6, which for me starts and ends a couple of days early and a couple of days late because my wife and I are adventuring to Holland! Yup, I'm finally spending a spring break how it should be spent!

With that, I hope everyone is enjoying their day off today. I look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow!

"It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!" ~Mark Twain

March 2, 2012

This week was utterly crazy! We had some form of an assembly every single day this week. A complete dischevelment of our schedule. Craziness, I tell you! On Monday we had short gathering so the administration could make sure that the students were all on the same page with our most recent fighter/survivor. His mom came in to give the students all an update and let them all know how he was doing. We also had our very own Kambri get up and talk to let the students know what it's like for him. Considering she's a survivor herself, she was able to give some insight that the students wouldn't have otherwise had. Thanks for that Kambri!
Tuesday we had an extension of Anti-bullying week with another, far more age appropriate presentation. Wednesday we met for the 7th grade orientation. Thursday we had our Jazz assembly and Friday we had an hour and a half of the spectatcular Officer Penrod and this week's DARE class. There wasn't a single day that had a normal schedule. Monday will be nice to get back into routine.

I want to ellaborate on the Jazz assembly. This came due to our spectacular efforts in the reading contest. There were 38 schools that participated, reading around 18 million minutes. Our one school was 1.2 million of those, putting us in the top ten and earning us a visit from a Jazz player. Honestly, this is the first time we've gotten the Jazz player that I actually recognized the player they sent to us. Thank you C.J. Miles for visiting our school! Below is a couple of different pictures. The first one is him with all of the top readers in the school, one per class from all grades. The second one is a staff picture with C.J.
Can you believe with the move into March that we only have 3 months of school left? It's moving by so quickly! Just a few reminders from here in the classroom:

* Term 3 ends on the 22 of March, so now is the time to keep a real close eye on grades to help your students keep on top of everything.

* Science Fair is next week. Boards need to be here ready to present first thing Wednesday (March 7).

* Book reports are due the week after that (March 13-15).

Really, aside from that, things are just continuing on as normal... Or maybe, it's not normal, but it is us, and if being us is crazy, than I'd rather be crazy, especially if we're in it together!

"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success." ~Henry Ford