Wednesday, October 7, 2009

One week and then a week off...

This week started off with an excellent day! While the weather is starting to get colder, there are many good things that are keeping the classroom busy.

8J has started a Treaties in the Classroom unit in Social Studies and in ELA we are working on Narratives of the First Nations. I am trying to link what we are doing in both classes so that students can relate better to the material. This will also help to make the classes more dynamic and help the material come alive. The hope of integrating curriculum is that school will begin to mirror real life. We don't separate our everyday lives into ELA or Social Studies or Science. Everything happens all at once so it only makes sense to have school start to look like that as well. We have read two narratives in ELA:
  1. Dene - Creation of Seasons
  2. World Parent
Premiere Brad Wall mandated that all educators teach Treaties in the Classroom. The Office of the Treaty Commissioner has come up with a great resource that lays out how to teach this sometimes controversial topic. We have only done a couple of days, basically an introduction, of this topic. One of the major topics that we have been discussing is how long the treaties were designed to last for.

You are in my Heart till the sun will never shine, my Dearest..

"As long as the sun shines, and the rivers flow" is what is stated in the material and in the video that we have watched. What does this video mean to you and who put these conditions into the treaties?

South Saskatchewan River

ELA 8K is finishing up their final projects on Mystery at Latham House. They have two tasks:
  1. Create a cover for the novel. It must include a picture related to the novel, the title and the author. Stay tuned for pictures of how these covers turn out. I have seen the beginnings of this task and they look great!
  2. Write a different ending to the novel. It must be a page long, double spaced. The students will be posting these endings to their blogs which will be created this week.
I have placed links to all of the blogs that the students have created on our class site. You can find them here. As I said before, the students from ELA 8K will be creating their blogs by the end of the week and I will post them to this page as well.

Photos from Flickr Creative Commons - River (Levendis) and sun (Thai Jasmine)

4 comments:

  1. Well what i think about the quote was that how the treaties started and on how the buffalos,clothes,food and more trade furs were getting less trades as in Buffalos were disappearing and how there were getting less fur trades

    well the person who said

    "As long as the sun shines, and the rivers flow"

    I would of thought that one of there Anceators said it
    '

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  2. if the sun and the river stop running the treaties will stop. The treaties will only stop if people die and the world ends.

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  3. "As long as the sun shines,and the river flow"

    that mean the treaties well stop

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  4. Hi Miss Jordan. Thanks for using my photo! It was springtime when I took it, but the actual spring was still a very long way off. We were eventually rewarded for our patience with a very, very long autumn, which we don't have the luxury of this year. But I'm just happy to have a decent picture of the South Saskatchewan just outside of Moose Jaw.

    I would invite you to visit http://artsboard.sk.ca/Grants/grant_artsSmarts.shtml and take a look through the ArtsSmarts guidelines. The deadline is only 20 days away, but maybe that's enough time for you to put a project together.

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