Journal Entry #18

Wednesday November 26, 2008

The house was a little lonely this morning without Dan sitting in our living room, rearing to go!

This morning I was lucky enough to have two open periods before I began to teach for the remainder of the day. My students were at PE first hour and then they had Spanish. During this time I went to the cafeteria, got a coffee and started work. I don’t know what it is about the coffee in the SIS cantina (caf) but it kind of made me crazy! I thought there was only one espresso shot in it, but I had one yesterday before leaving school and I had so much energy I needed to go for a run. This morning I felt like I was on super-work mode. I accomplished so much, which is good, but not quire sure whatever is in the coffee is healthy or safe for me, haha oops.

During my work time I prepared for the year three through six assembly that I will be leading tomorrow morning. All of the primary staff of these years as well as Sue, head of primary, and Chris, head of SIS will be attending. I am going to have the year six students join me in teaching the rest of the students a welcoming song. There is a song and dance. We will sing together G-O-O-D-MORNING GOOD MORNING, GOOD GOOD, GOOD MORNING WOOO. It should be pretty entertaining. After teaching the students the song, I am going to talk a little bit about Thanksgiving and what we celebrate back home.

After this I will invite the students to help me tell the story of Sadako and the peace cranes. The assemblies are intended to share some of the things you have been learning in class with the rest of the school. I asked both Ms. Lisa and Ms. Hartland’s class if there were any volunteers who would help me with the assembly tomorrow to stay in before going out to recess at lunch. I had 21 students show up wanting to participate! I was not expecting this high of a turnout and had to adjust my plan, but was thrilled that the students wanted to be involved. The students will all have a few lines of the story to read along with the pictures that will be displayed on a big screen in the assembly room. At the end of the story we will have a few students who can fold paper cranes by heard do a quick demonstration.

At the end I will invite everyone to come up to our pod and check out our display of Sadako’s story, and origami peace cranes.

After planning for the assembly I taught my math lesson on fraction vocabulary. I thought it was so fun and went really well. To start the lesson I brainstormed with the students important vocabulary words the one would need to know when working with fractions. We created a web/graphic organizer on the SMART board with a list of words. In the middle of the web was the word “fractions,” and off of this circle there were a number of smaller circles that said, numerator, denominator, factors, greatest common factor, mixed number, improper fraction, simplify/reduce, common denominator, and equivalent fractions. I explained that I will assign students to work in pairs or small groups. Their task is to define the vocabulary word that they are given and give an example of the term. To explain my expectations I did an example with the word in the center of our web, “Fractions.” My definition will say, a fraction is part of a whole that is made up of equal parts. For example a circle with six equal parts. A fraction is also a part of a whole group of items, for example one of two soccer balls is blue. The fraction being represented is ½. I categorized the vocabulary words by difficulty. I gave the lower group easier words to define such as numerator and denominator. The middle group received medium difficulty terms such as mixed number and improper fractions, and I challenged the highest group to define terms such as simplify, greatest common factor and equivalent fractions.

Once the students were done writing their term, definition, and example on the white boards they needed to present their information to the class. The students came up to the front of the room group by group and explained their definition and example. It was amazing, they turned into little teachers. Even the students who never turn in their work and have difficulty with math were getting into the activity. One of the students picked up the whiteboard marker and was like, “Alright you lot, I’m going to teach you all what a denominator is so listen up. I will draw an example up on the board.” Blah blah blah “Any questions?” haha. It was great. A few of them drew their pictures and then wrote on the board drawing/definition by (their names). The questions were also great. Andrew was explaining how to simplify fractions and one of the fractions was 24/48ths. Gloria raised her hand and said, “Uh could I please see a picture representing that fraction.” Andrew was like, “uh sure.” He rapidly made a whole bunch of dots on the white board and said, “Right that’s 48, and this half of dots is 24. 24/48th is also equal to ½.”

Ms. Lisa also really liked the lesson and explained that she will be using it next year. She had one of the teacher aids type up all of the student definitions so that we can display them in the classroom. One of the IB standards that needs to be fulfilled for the math requires the students to know the vocabulary with fractions. The lesson reviewed all of the vocabulary, but in addition creating the examples required the students to do some math and explain the process of some of the tasks we have been learning in our fractions unit.

*Special thanks to Dan, who talked with me about how to wrap up my fractions unit this week…it was a hit, I’ll let you know how pizza fractions go tomorrow =]*

The afternoon remained busy as I had two more lessons to teach as well as help the students prepare their lines for the assembly tomorrow morning. I gave a short lesson to an advanced writing group. I used some of Jill Pott’s materials on the Writers Tool kit. We worked on visualizing a familiar room, writing details about the room and then expanding the details. Some of them were amazing, I mean really amazing. “The lavender sofa, splashed with a pastel flower pattern, sat longingly in the corner of the room waiting for my granddad to return from work and relax on the soft fluffy cushions.” Wow…wow.

After the writing lesson, I covered for a teacher by doing a multi-cultural lesson with a small group of students. Wednesdays is the “weird” day at SIS where a whole bunch of students leave in the afternoon for activities (horseback riding, golfing, or water sports). Students who do not pay for extra activities have alternative lessons at school. The students and I made mint tea and looked at pictures from Chefcharoun, a orphanage located in Morocco that is supported by SIS. It was my job to make connections between SIS and the kids at the orphanage, to help the students understand that the kids at the orphanage are not that different from them. While we waited for the tea to cool, we played a game similar to “Kick the Can” that the students play at the orphanage. We returned to the classroom with fifteen minutes left before the end of the school day. We drank (some students ran to the bathroom and spit out =]) the tea, and ate bisques (cookies). We also looked at some traditional clothing that the people of Morocco wear.

After school I stayed for a staff meeting on planning to write the students end of the term report cards. Wish me good luck for the assembly tomorrow morning!