AMP Night

Students with perfect attendance and less than five lates for the month of September were invited to the first AMP (attendance motivation program) night. This night was organized by the middle years homeroom teachers and was held at the Dene High School from 7-9 pm. There were 36 students from grade 7-9 that were invited to AMP night. When the students arrived they had popcorn, drinks, played in the open gym, watched movies and even played some games of sardine and hide-and-so-seek. Fun was had by all that attended!

Congratulations to those students that were invited to attend this event.

Attendance resets each month so there is still a chance to get yourself at the next AMP night!

How to...

Here is a Jing tutorial that I created to let the students know how to put images, videos and links into their blog posts!

Enjoy!

How to insert images, video and links into a Blogger post

Class Site

Here is link to our class website. Check it out!

What are we up to?

I know that it has been a while since I updated everyone on the Happenings of Room 114. Last week was a short, but busy week for me and for that reason I have just updating now. Here are some pictures of things that we have been doing in class:

Below is a picture of the sentences that the students wrote during their first Speed Week. We are starting another week this week and stronger sentences is the goal!

Below is some of the student work that I had described in one of my earlier blog posts about Canadian culture:



This is the collections of collages gather around the Canadian map!
The students came up with the following reasons why the newcomers left their land to come to Canada:
In the 8J homeroom the students have started work on their own blogs. I will post the links to these blogs very shortly, please check again soon for the links!

A New Day

The first unit that we are studying this year in Social Studies has to do with culture and immigration. Today the students each got themselves a Maple Leaf and had to create a collage of what it means to be Canadian...what makes up the Canadian culture?

Some students picked pictures of hockey players, other pictures of Canadian bill, while others still picked pictures of the Canadian flag. There are many things that make each of us Canadian's, and many things that make us proud Canadians. Health care, diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, peacekeeping versus war, democratic government, and rich Aboriginal history are just some of the things that I think of when asked what it means to be Canadian. What does it mean to you to be a Canadian? I would love to read your comments.

ELA 8J has started work on adjectives and are progressing very well. Adjectives are words that describe a noun or a pronoun. Can you identify the adjective in the following sentence:

The tiny dog ran across the street.

Let me know what you think it is, if you are one of my students...bonus marks!

ELA 8K finished chapter 5 questions for The Mystery at Latham House and will be starting to read chapter 6. We are moving along quite nicely in the novel and will be done it in no time...I can't wait to see what happens with Toby and Ali!

On a hot summer day...

September 14, 2009

It figures that just as school starts the weather starts to get nice. Even though we have not had much nice weather here in Saskatchewan all summer! The students might have been squirmy and hot but we got some great things done today! Here is what happened in Room 114 today:

ELA 8K beat me in a trivia game that reviewed the first four chapters of the novel that we are reading, Mystery at Latham House. Not only did they beat me but I believe I only got one point compared to their 15 or so. The entire class had to work as a team, if they answered the question correctly they got a point, if they answered the question wrong or didn't know the answer I got a point. Needless to say, they know most of the answers! For their efforts they will be well rewarded!

ELA 8J started Speed Week, which is a week long activity to help them write better sentences. Today we brainstormed 100 things that we can write about. It took a while to get there, but we accomplished that goal. Tomorrow is day 2 of Speed Week! We also continued our work on pronouns...hopefully you all enjoyed the videos!

Hope that you all have a great night and I can't wait to see you at the school tomorrow morning!

School House Rock videos

Until I can figure out how to embed videos on the class website I will post them on my class blog. Here are two YouTube clips about Nouns and Pronouns. Enjoy!

Welcome to Room 114

Hello parents, students, administrators and fellow students!

Room 114 has been a busy place to start the school year, as both teacher and students try to learn about each other! Grade 8 Social Studies and English Language Arts are in full swing within the walls of this classroom.

Currently ELA 8K is reading the novel Mystery at Latham House. This novel has 1-2 page chapters and is about two best friends, Toby and Ali, that explore a mansion that has long been abandoned. Supposedly, a young girl and a man died in this house. Stay tuned to see what the students discover about this mysterious house!

ELA 8J is working through a unit that will introduce them to good writing skills. Parts of speech and weekly sentence writing are the focus of this unit. At the end of the unit students will have the opporunity to make a video about a specific part of speech and this will be posted on their blogs so check back!

The social studies class started off learning about culture and how culture is taught to youth. They formed groups and created their own cultures that had their own beliefs, norms, institutions and activities that were vital to their new culture. They created a visual for their culture (map, flag, song, etc.) and then presented it to the rest of the class. The students will soon be posting these to their blogs so check those out!

I want to congratulate Laycen, Ronald, Joshua, and Troy for winning the noun/pronoun matching game that we played in ELA 8J. Enjoy your breakfast on Monday!

Check back often for more updates on the Happenings of Room 114!