Gripe: My blog DISAPPEARING for a week. Now that I’ve looked at my stats, I can see that it was a blank, unviewable page for seven whole days (even though I didn’t realize it for the first few). Scary. Hype: It’s back! My daddy fixed it!! Yay! Dear blog, I apologize for updating your plugins…
Tag: teaching
School Snippets: BIG questions from seven-year-olds
I had an interesting discussion with my French Immersion Grade 2s yesterday – an impromptu one that I was not prepared for. We were looking at the globe and doing a little summative review – remember what continents are? What’s this line around the middle called? Where do we live? Then, one student asked how…
Rebecca Black’s Friday and Other YouTube Sensations
It was a couple months ago that I was first introduced to the video of this special, special new song that has taken YouTube by storm. My husband preambled it by telling me it was basically the worst song ever. I’ll admit I was skeptical. Could this really be worse than Kylie Minogue’s “I Just…
School Snippets: Foreign Unrest with 9- and 10-year-olds
Last week in my Grade 4/5 Core French class, we opted out of French for one period, because the students wanted to talk about Libya. It reminded me of music class in high school: once in a while, our music teacher would tell us to put away our instruments and we would sit and talk…
School Snippets: Snow Fort Currency
Friday was a fun day: the last day of school before Christmas holidays. Treats out the wazoo, everybody in a good mood, movies in the gym for the kids (N.B. though: Santa Paws is too scary for kindergartners – the the evil foster mom with the incinerator freaked them out), and no expectations for the…
Kids Are Great
Perhaps it’s time to talk about some kids other than mine. So, a week late… let’s talk about the school play, “A Night at the Wax Museum”. It was worth writing about, although the words will never do it justice. It was a cute play, created by my colleague Mr. A and his actors, about…
My Bloggiversary
How silly that the first week of November (which some call National Blog Posting Month) 2010, I was so busy and harried and generally off my rocker that I did not manage to blog AT ALL. I missed my very own Bloggiversary, November 2nd! This time last year, I barely knew what a blog was,…
School Snippets #6: Halloween
I’m sheepish to say that I haven’t put much effort into Halloween since I’ve been an adult. Even more shamefully, there have been two years out of the last three where I didn’t even manage to get a real pumpkin for jack-o-lantern purposes (I left it so late that there were none left – seriously!)….
School Snippets #5
I’ve been helped to understand a significant truth. I’ve noticed the craze of “silly bands” – as a teacher, I can’t avoid them. For those of you who are not between the ages of six and twelve, they’re stretchy bracelets that form different shapes when relaxed, in all different colours. (Like the 2010 version of…
School Snippets #4
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…