The staff at our school is working on making kids better mathematicians by teaching them to reflect on their processes. In one Grade 1 class, the teacher gave the children a simple exercise: you have 8 goldfish to distribute into 3 bowls. Draw them in the bowls. The children had to say how they knew…
Author: dilovelyadmin
Thanks-giving
Last week I talked with my Grade 2 class about Thanksgiving and the things we’re grateful for. I was rather disappointed. My school is populated mostly with children who are well-fed, well-dressed, and very well looked after. These kids were like, “Um, je dis merci pour mon Nintendo DSI…” So I told them about how…
Toddler Tracks III: Sixteen Months Old
It was actually Friday that my baby boy turned sixteen months old… and he’s getting less like a baby every day. Sorry for the wait – I know it’s been a long time since the last Toddler Tracks. It’s been a busy weekend, including the lovely wedding of my sister-in-law, coinciding with our first true…
BANG Book Review: The Year of Living Biblically
This month’s GGG book, chosen by the oft-mentioned Skye ( 🙂 ) was The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs. Skye picked it because she had read The Know-It-All by the same author and loved it. Not all the gals who made it to the meeting had finished the book, but we were all…
School Snipp…ing #3
This past Thursday, our school participated in the Terry Fox Run. These are the times that I love being part of a school community; it was positively heartwarming. First, it’s great to see the kids push themselves to run. Some of the Grade 6s ran about 20 laps of the park: that’s over twelve kilometres!…
BANG Movie Review: Easy A, + Random School Snippet
When I saw the trailer for Easy A, I was intrigued. I thought it looked like a smart comedy – and it was. Rotten Tomatoes agrees: it’s at 86% today. It’s about a girl who, partly due to peer pressure and partly due to her soft spot for the downtrodden, acquires a reputation as a…
Shake Your Tailfeather
Everybody needs dancing. It’s in our biology, right along with the need for singing and banging a drum – across cultures and continents. It connects us to our communities and our partners and our own selves. Do you dance? (Say yes.) Where do you dance? What makes you do it? What rhythm or song inspires…
Toddler Tracks II
My kid is so awesome. He eats veggies. He tickles the ivories. He often beats Daddy at blackjack while on the potty. (I know, not Quakerly at all… but it keeps him seated, he’s learning to say numbers like “twenty”… and he doesn’t actually know he’s betting.) And he is walking to beat the band!…
School Snippets #2
OOOPS. Just found out that one of my Grade 2 students, whom I thought was a girl, is actually a boy. And I’m wondering why I’m such a dummy, why I was so sure he was a girl. I mean, on the first day, I actually thought to myself, Wow, what a strange name for…
Toddler Tracks I
I apologize for not managing to post this until Tuesday… because… Sunday we had major step-taking!! We took E to great-step-grandma’s birthday party, lots of folks around to watch/catch him… he was on a roll. At one point he was walking to Daddy, who was skilfully backing up to maximize steps, and I counted fifteen!…