Here are this weeks current events;
Tuesday - Kevin
Wednesday - Elvin
Thursday - Eric
Friday - JungBin
Wednesday - Elvin
Thursday - Eric
Friday - JungBin
I have to start out with a problem I am seeing in class and something I would like you to talk with your student about. There has been a decline in the quality of the work I am seeing handed in. This is both in class and homework. I have always discussed with the class how important it is to make sure that the work they do is neat and tidy. While this will be different from student to student, I do still want to see work that is not only complete, but neat and tidy as well. We are going to steer towards this more in the coming week.
Our health unit on the Human Body will take us to a week of Chinese Wellness. There are four activities that we are going to participate in throughout the week that all have a Chinese theme to them. These have been kindly set up by the Experiential Learning Program. At the end of the program we will use our blogs to post a reflection of what we learned.
Our writing is based in our unit of Fantasy. We learned about the Hero's journey from Ms. Sutton and using this idea we planned our own journey with two characters and a specific setting which was a picture given to them. Some of the journey's the students have planned should lead to some very interesting stories. We are on our first drafts which are due in by Wednesday. We will then revise and edit before completing a final draft.
We have returned to reading workshop this week with students completing a reading journal entry on their blog once every 6 days, having a reading conference with me and a mini lesson that is dependent on what they need further lessons on. We have also finished our last novel study for the year and will start book clubs this coming week. The reading they do for book clubs can be used as the home reading and should be recorded daily in their reading log.
We have taken a short journey into the skin this past week and will now look at how we keep it healthy. This is in preparation for our unit final assessment in which students will choose a body system and report on what it is, how it works and what we can do to keep it healthy. This is a class project and will be reported to the rest of the class toward the end of the quarter.
IN the next few weeks we will dive into our Student Led Conferences. These will be held the third week in March and will take the place of the report card for the third quarter. Students will organize their conference in the L21 fashion of ISB's learning. We are currently gathering all the work we have done this year and organizing it in this way.
I want to thank all the students in the class for donating to Baby Brian's surgery with the Hot Chocolate Drive. 5HD raised over RMB1000 for this very worthwhile cause and I think the students should be proud of this accomplishment.
In music class students are bring treated to a special set of lessons from a man from Ghana in West Africa. Kofi is taking the students through African rhythms, dances and chants. This will help students as they use their home made instruments to create their own music.
That is all for now. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me and I will gladly set up a time for us to meet.
