Our second time in the cooking lab was just as successful as the first. This time the students cooked banana bread from scratch. We even had to make our own buttermilk so they looked up the portions of milk to vinegar on the web and in the end, everything was amazing. The taste tests by many teachers and all the students indicated that the bread was quite a success. Our last time in the cooking lab will be for a brunch in which the students will both plan, organize and cook for the whole class. Besides the great opportunity for Experiential Learning, this also is a real world use of fractions. Unfortunatley most of them are in imperial measurements rather than metric, but that just adds to experience.
Students will be having a totally different homework experience this week as they plan and organize their Impact project. Each student has a journal that has many activities and sheets to plan and keep themselves orgainzed. This work is in conjunction with the teaching that will happen each day in class during our Inquiry classes. Students will work in groups for this project.
Added to this, there is the planning process for the last report/research of the year. This time students have to choose a topic of their own choice and there is no booklet for them. There is timeline and also a rubric to allow them to know both what the deadlines will be and the assessment of the project. I look forward to some really interesting topics for this.
Celebrate and Share the Arts (CASTA) is this Thursday and 5HD is first up in the theatre at 9:00am. I have organized the morning to make sure they have time to get into costume and be prepared for their acts. I am looking forward to seeing it for the first time. I am sure they will do just great.
We have started our next math unit on Coordiantes, Area, Volume and Capacity. I ahve attached the family letter to the bottom of this post. Students did well on the last assessment except for the open response. Most of the students seemed to have trouble with unit fractions to represent other unit fractions. I have gone over this with them again in class and we re-did the open response as a class to see what was expected.
Although I am sure that the students will remind you, please be aware that this Friday is a national holiday and there is no school. I am sure the students will enjoy their last holiday before the end of the school year.
As always, if you have any questions or need to see me please email me and I will gladly set up a time for us to meet.
Harold Daw
