Starting today, I am discontinuing my use of this blog as a means of communicating classroom news. New updates can be found on my teacher page at our new school website.
Like I do here, I'll be using the calendar mostly for test and assignment dates. Please bookmark my page and check it often.
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Thank you to everyone who put lots of effort into their debates. And a special thank you to the final debate groups who agreed to reverse their positions as an extra challenge.
If you haven't handed in your debate prep sheet, do so tomorrow morning. Looking forward to a fun and safe day on the river tomorrow! I had a lot of fun today watching our Social Studies debates. I thought many students had put a lot of effort into researching their topic and crafting their arguments. I thought the timers and moderators were all quite official and professional; and I thought the judges were thoughtful in their feedback and objective in their decisions. It was a truly great day.
Tomorrow, we will finish with out final 2 debates. Yesterday, we reviewed the expectations for next week's debate; we reviewed the schedule of debate; and students were challenged to craft an argument using quantitative data.
Today, we started looking at vocabulary for our Aztec unit. Each student was given a vocabulary word and a Frayer Model card to fill out. Some students completed this during class time. These vocabulary cards are due on Tuesday morning. Finally, students had their last period for planning and researching for their debate next week. Here is the ppt with the roles and order of debates. Hope you all have a wonderful long weekend! Students had about 20 minutes for last-minute studying before our test today. We wrote the test and then wen over the answers.
Students were given a "debate prep" sheet (due Thursday) and time in the Learning Commons to research their given topic for next week's debate. I'll have a debate schedule ready to share in class tomorrow. Students were put into groups of three and assigned a debatable topic from our Social Studies curriculum. We'll have research and preparation time in our next three classes and we'll host our classroom debates next week on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Reminder: we have our Japan final tomorrow. After some independent reading, we divided our class into groups based on their opinion of school uniforms. In small groups, students generated a list of arguments that supported their opinion and a list of arguments that refuted their opinion. We shared our best arguments on the board and critiqued them to understand the elements of a strong argument.
We wrote a practice test in preparation for our test on Tuesday. NOTE: this test was meant as a barometer for general understanding of this unit and not as a complete study guide. The actual study guide that we've been using in class will be a much more thorough resource. Today we reviewed some of the work from last week, including the sheet on run-on sentences. We went over half and will finish on Thursday.
We brainstormed words/images/ideas/anything we thought of regarding the Aztecs to start our new and final unit. Reminder: we'll have our Japan unit final on Tuesday. Finally, we watched the short film The Landlady based on the short story we read last week. Good luck to everyone participating in the Track & Field meet tomorrow! Hello Everyone,
It's nice to be back after a couple days away last week. First thing this morning, all teachers in the school reviewed the following policies:
We had a wonderful gallery walk today with lots of creative and thoughtful artifacts. I took some pictures and I'll post them this evening on the school's Twitter feed. Those students who did not have their artifact were asked to stay after school to figure out a plan for completing their work. Students selected Tuesday, May 15 to write their Japan unit final. We'll be starting our final unit this week (The Aztecs). Today we continued wrapping up our Japan unit, learning about the process of modernization.
We listened to part of a CBC podcast and made notes about what made it a successful podcast. Our school received new microphones this year and I'm hoping students can produce short audio pieces with them. I'm away tomorrow and Friday. In my absence, students will:
I hope you all have a great weekend; I'll see you Monday. |
AuthorMr. Spencer teaches Grade 8 Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Drama at Mount Royal School. Archives
May 2018
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