Busy Day

Mrs. Chambers sent me a copy of her January newsletter home and amongst all the good information in it was the identification of some of the topics she plans to cover with the class over the next while.

Families is one that she is working on with the grade ones and when I visited the class today, the students were working alone and in small groups - depending on the task - to collect information and write about some of the things a family needs. Students used different print resources to look for ideas and, in some cases, to cut out images they could use to go with their "written" work.

Students were actively engaged in their projects and it was a pleasure to see.

The snow was coming down today and the grade sevens wanted to follow up on a discussion I had with some of them on Tuesday about throwing snowballs. I had talked to them about my concerns about safety and also about modeling good behaviour for the younger students. They took my concerns politely on Monday and today presented some arguments to Mrs. Andersen. Using the "teachable moment", Mrs. Andersen gave them an assignment consistent one of their learning outcomes in Language Arts ... to write a persuasive argument. And they presented me with their arguments, ones which I will consider and then take into a class discussion, probably on Friday. It might be a good debate.

Later this afternoon I was in the grade seven class again and saw two different group presentations. One was a rap (which I had videoed the first draft of a couple of weeks ago) as a "public service message" on what a student can do if they are not comfortable at school and included some advice to victims of bullies.

The second group presentation I listened to was from three students who had gathered data and talked about peer pressure, both from a positive perspective and from a negative perspective. They had done a good job and were well prepared to answer some very good questions from their classmates.

Today was the kind of day that has me walking home with a smile. Good teaching and good quality work from grade one through to grade seven.

Now to think about my counter points for the upcoming snowball meeting...