HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Entry #19

This morning was the big assembly. The beginning of the day was a little stressful because I did not have time to run through the story with the students reading their parts because so many students were leaving for activities. I wanted to get to school a little early to get everything set up, but that backfired because the bus was late. I ended up getting to school at 9:00 when we usually get to school at 8:45ish. I ran up to my classroom and got the students who would be helping me with the presentation. I also grabbed a couple of needed extra copies of the script for those students could not find their script or it “fell in a puddle.”

I brought my laptop to the theater where the assembly would be held in hopes of playing the Japanese Sakura Cherry Blossom song I had downloaded the night before while the students did a paper crane folding demonstration. I thought the song might be nice to break the silence while the students worked. Little did I know, Christian, the IT employee who was helping me set up the PowerPoint on the large projector said that he not only needed my zip drive, but also my laptop. I did not have time to figure out how to explain to someone how to play the song from my laptop up in the special effects booth or how to get it to play over the speakers. Oh well, scratch that idea.

Christian told me that he had a remote that I could use for the PowerPoint but that one of my students needed to run and get it from the office. Then he also told me that I might need my power cord and adapter incase my computer died during the presentation. This request took about five minutes for me to understand because Christina doesn’t speak English. I don’t know my technology terms in Spanish…so I finally grabbed a student to help translate the problem. I briefly left the students in the theater, ran back to the primary building, grabbed my charger and adapter and ran back. What a start.

The students and staff would be coming down to the theater at 9:20 and we still needed to run through the script. I lined up the students in front of the screen; however it was difficult for all of the students to fit so I had some of them standing on boxes. Of course, this caused a MAJOR issue, because they all wanted to stand on the boxes. After getting the excited students settled we ran through the story. I made sure to emphasize that they needed to speak loudly, clearly, and slowly. I also wanted them to step forward when they were saying their part and try to make eye contact at least once during their part. Some of the students did this brilliantly during the presentation, others I thought were hard to hear.

In no time, the year 3,4,5 and 6 students and staff began to filter in to the assembly. It was nice that the music lady played a CD at this time. I walked over to her and asked if she could start the CD again when the two students demonstrated folding the paper cranes. It was no “Sakura,” but it kind of had an oriental sound to it.

Despite the stressful and hectic preparation for the assembly it went very well. The staff and students enjoyed the “Good Morning” song and dance, the story of Sadako and her cranes, as well as the origami demonstration. Ms. Lisa filmed the assembly and I am going to try and transfer to tape to a DVD. This will be fun to watch later.

Even though the assembly was over I still had a very busy day ahead of me. I was finishing up my fractions unit in math. Today we talked about equivalent fractions and hot to cross-multiply to check if two fractions were equivalent. We also talked about how we can order fractions with different denominators by using common knowledge and pictures instead of changing the fraction to have a common denominator. After explaining this process we played a fun game that gave the students practice ordering fractions. I called it the “Pizza Game,” yes real original, I know. The students all had individual white boards and they were working in pairs. We chose partners from our newly created clock partner sheets. The students drew a clock on a white piece of paper and had partners sign their name at different times on the clock. So I would find a friend and say, will you be my 12 o’clock partner, they say yes, sign their name at 12 on my sheet and I sign my name at their 12. For other activities that require randomly selected partners I could use the clock partner’s sheet. For example: for this activity find your 5 o’clock partner.

To play the “Pizza Game,” one student rolls the die and writes the first number they get on their white board as the numerator. The same student rolls the die again and writes the second number as the denominator of their fraction. Then the student needed to draw a picture of their fraction. For example they may have to draw 4/6ths. They ate 4 out of 6 slices of pizza. Then the second player does the same thing. The player that eats the most slices of pizza gets a tick mark. The students played up to three and then switched partners. The game challenged all of the students, especially when they rolled an improper fraction. For example they rolled a 6 first and then a 3. If they draw the pictures correctly they should eat three whole pizzas.

After math we had break and then I started my second lesson. This was a language/POI lesson on evacuees. The students have been studying evacuees for the past few weeks through film and articles. The central idea of this lesson was, “Using evacuee photographs, produce a skit in which students can communicate in powerful ways an understanding of their feelings and emotions towards the plight of evacuees.” (yes very wordy, I thought so too) As a class we watched a quick video that I found on the BBC websites

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/launch_ani_wwtwo_movies_evacuees.html

and looked at pictures of children being evacuated during WWII. The students were asked to pay close attention to the different experiences and facial expressions of the children. Some children in the pictures thought they were going on a holiday and were smiling; others must have had a clearer understanding of the circumstance and looked very sad. After lunch we returned to the lesson, I got the students in groups. Each group was going to produce a drama on a different part of the evacuation process so that all of the skits didn’t end up the same. One group did their skit on saying goodbye to their parents before being evacuated. Another group did their skit on coming back home, another while they were on the train etc. The dramas were pretty good, some groups did an excellent job. One group even had two of the children speaking German and the other two translating it into English…so cool. My assessment of the activity was more heavily weighted on how the students worked together in groups instead of the presentation. I explained to the students that I would be walking around doing a quick informal assessment of how well they were working in groups. Most students did just fine.

Funny story about this lesson, the last time I was discussing doing a drama for an assignment, Ms. Harland kept calling a skit a “sketch.” I had never used this term for a drama, but just assumed that that’s what the English call a skit. So while explaining this assignment I kept calling it a sketch. It wasn’t until I saw a couple of groups asking if they could use markers for their sketch that I realized not everyone calls a skit a “sketch.” They thought that they had to do a drawing, ha. Even after explaining there were different settings and characters – they thought I meant a piece of art, duh. Wow, talk about miscommunication, and the sad thing is…we aren’t even speaking a different language.

After school it was raining so football practice was canceled. I stayed after with Mireille and forced myself to finish a standard.

Mireille contacted at least a dozen restaurants/hotels to see if we could get a turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving but it didn’t work out. If it would have been possible, she would have gotten one, but it didn’t happen. We settled for going out for dinner together. Olive, Sam, and Mireille joined “The Americans,” for dinner at the “Irish” pub, haha. It was nice of them to celebrate with us, but I think we all definitely missed the family and food! I think that this year is the first I have gone without pumpkin pie. =] Told my mom we need to have a make up Thanksgiving dinner on Christmas!

Tomorrow is Friday! =]