daw.com - February 27

It has been quite an emotional roller coaster for me this week.  Monday was a great day with the celebration of my birthday with the students.  I cannot begin to say how special it was.  Roses with words from each student was a great way to celebrate my 56th birthday.  Thank-you to everyone.

However, on Wed I recieved word that a student I taught in Grade 5 at HKIS, who is a Senior this year, passed away from injuries sustained in a car accident while on Holiday over the Chinese New Year.  His name was Griffin Lee.  I do not handle death well and was mostly an emotional blob for the whole day.  I was able to get through and will be part of a honor in his name when there is a memorial at HKIS sometime in the future.  Please remember to continually tell your student how much they mean to you as these kinds of disasters do happen - thankfully not very often.

We are in full swing preparing for our final project in the Human Body unit.  Students have completed selecting a condition of the body and a minimum of 4 guiding questions to help them through the research process.  They have two more weeks to complete their presentation at which time they will present it to the entire class.  This is the first time they have had to do this.  They have a copy of the assignment, rubric and list of some conditions on their Ondrive which is available at home through the internet.  If they have time, they can certainly do some research at home.

We are also preparing for our Student Led Conferences which happen the week we return from Spring Break.  There will be more coming on this in the near future from the ES office so watch for it.  I do expect everyone to be involved and present.  As much as possible I would like both parents to attend the conference please.

Students have completed their first round of book clubs, chosen their books, and now are on their second round.  They choose the books from a selection I have in the class and they are responsible for reading the assigned pages (chosen by the group) in time for the book club meetings every Wed and Fri.  So far it has gone fairly well but I still want a deeper understanding of the reading they are doing.  I model it in class, we have lesssons (currently about inferring) and they have time to practice it so I expect to see continued improvement as we do this for the remainder of the year.

I have placed more photos from the class in my FLICKR account which you can access here​.  feel free to copy any you wish to keep.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns please let me know and I will arrange to meet with you.

Have a great weekend,

Harold Daw

daw.com - February 8

We are fast approaching the Chinese New Year holiday and in the last week before the holiday there are some things the class is going to complete or prepare for later.

We have been writing our first essay piece on changes to the cafeteria.  So far we have chosen three ways to improve the cafeteria and written about them, explained them and dug as deep as wel could.  Next we will put in the introduction and conclusion to the piece and then publish it.  We are using Office 365 for this and so far it has gone fairly smoothly.

We will complete unit 6 on Graphing and Fractions by Thursday of this week.  Our next unit is on Exponents and Negative numbers.  This will be the first time this year that we dealve in to the number system as it works before 0.  We also finish math stations this week with two more meetings before the final assessment.

We have also started lessons on inferencing or the creating of a conclusion based on textual evidence.  This is hard for the students but necessary as they progress in their reading level past the basic to understand deeper meaning.

We have had our first two reading club meetings and they seem to be going well.  I was asked why students cannot read ahead - it is not that they cannot but rather that I would prefer not. This is because I want to explore predicting and it cannot be done if the reading piece has been completed.  I also want students to really dig into the reading and not just cover the words.  The books I have chosen for the students to read are at the top end of their reading level so they will offer students some real chances to think through what they are reading.

Our inquiry this week will start to look at human conditions.  We did a brainstorm of these last week and developed quite a list.  This week we will read a couple of books that will help studenst relate to what these are the possibilities for a cure.  It will also look at a real life situation.  If you have people in your family that have a condition please talk this over with your student as it might well be the interest they need to research this after the CNY holiday.

If anyone is planning on leaving early for the holiday could you let me know ASAP so I can make the proper arrangements.  I thank you in advance for this.

Have a great week,

Harold Daw

daw.com - January 30

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I have been a teacher for 27 years now and today we did something that I have never done with a class in any school or at any level before.  We had a lesson in the kitchen and we baked up Cinnamon Muffins.  What a blast it was too.  Just look at all the faces of the students as we completed and started to eat our creation.  I am sold on this and will plan several more before the year is over.  Since all the measurements were in fractions it was also a great real world lesson from recent lessons.

We have also spent some this week doing two things simultaneously - writing a script for our section of Monkey King and learning all we can about Office 365.  It has been a very steep learning curve but so far we have completed a shared writing piece in the script and started to do our heart rate lab with the online version of PowerPoint.  So far all we have on the presentation is a table of the information but by the time we finish it will have a pie graph (something we have just learned in math class) and all the information we find about blood pressure as well.  All students had their BP measured this week and were surprised to find such a wide variation. We will also graph the class landmarks using the data we have collected.

Speaking of math, we started out new using on graphing and adding and subtracting fractions.  I have attached the family letter for unit 6 at the end of this blog post.   We should complete this before Chinese New Year.  It is mostly a continuation of what we started in unit 5. Myself, Mrs. Brister and Ms. Crowe are also experiemting with math stations so each student attends three of the 6 days with another teacher.  It is really great for studenst to work with studenst from other classes they do not regularly get to see and also with another teacher.

We will be restarting current events after the Chinese New year break.  Students will be introduced to NEWSELLA which is an online edcational newspaper.  It really has great articles for students.  We will use this to report on the news and happenings in the world.  Look out for this coming early in the week.

Earlier in the week we had an unannounced emergency drill and I have to report how impressed I was with the students.  It was automatic - quiety moved out of harms way, there was no noise and they listened for recording and anouncements.  There was no movement and everyone showed cool and collected emotions over this.  Being unannounced, there was no way to know if it was real or not.  Kudos to the students in 5HD.  I was so proud of them.

I feel I need to remind all parents that I do expect students to read for at least 5 days a week and I prefer all 7.  10-20 minutes of free reading, reading from news, family reading, oral reading or just interest reading is fine as long as they are reading.  Students should then be recording this on their reading log every day.  I give students a new log every 2-3 weeks.  The bring the completed log in and file it in their folder for future use.  Please help to continue to make this a reality.  If your student does not have reading material at home let me know.  I can arrange to have some brought home.  Thank-you in advance for this.

Talking about reading, we have started ourt first book clubs for the year.  This is assigned reading from me.  All students are in groups of 3 or 4 and they have 5 times they will meet to discuss the book before Chinese New year.  Then we start again right after the holiday and continue to the end of the year.  Students are reading "Just Right" books meaning they are at their reading level.  They get some choice from the selection I give them.

That is all the news from 5HD for this week and announcements for next week. As always, if there is a question or concern please let me know.  I will arrange a time for us to meet and work it out.

Harold Daw