Division 1: At the End of the Long Hall

On Tuesday and Wednesday night this week, we performed our musical production December in Our Town to a packed audience. Ticket requests were over 400 for the two nights combined; but from where I stood watching the evenings unfold, I know that we were closer to 500 audience members over the two nights’ performances, and if you include the 100 or so that attended the dress rehearsal on Tuesday morning, we had nearly 600 guests see our performance!

A lot of people helped make the performance a success, and I hesitate to start listing them, because I’m bound to miss someone. The real excitement of the whole production for me was seeing how much success so many in our 6/7 class had in the production, whether on the stage side, backstage, or on the promotions and ticketing side. It was fun to watch everyone contribute and add their creative flair to the whole affair.

We raised in the neighbourhood of $200 for the local food-bank as well as two full car-loads of food which was delivered to the food-bank drop-off at No.2 and Blundell on Wednesday and Thursday Morning this week! What a wonderful outcome from our event, to know that our hard work, in turn, will support some of the local families in need this holiday season. Now that is the spirit of December in Our Town!

Now that it’s over, we can get back to regular gym classes, and we won’t be singing quite as much (some of us, at least), but I think that this event is one that we will all fondly remember for a long time!

We chatted about the Caldecott Medal in class the other day, an I wanted to let you all know about some other book awards you might be interested in.

Why Care About Book Awards?

Award winning books are some of the best that have been written, hands down. These books go through months-long processes of being read, and reread by thousands of teachers, authors, critics, professors, and students until the panel for any given award decides on a long-list of books. Once a long-list is created, then it is, over a few months, reduced to a short list, or a list of finalists. It’s from the finalists that the winner is chosen and the award is given. Some people try to read all of the short-listed books for their favorite awards each year.

Some Different Awards

The Red Cedar Book Award is B.C.’s young reader’s choice award. You’d have a good reading year if you chose all your books from the short-list for this prize.

The Stellar Book Award is B.C.’s teen reader’s choice award.

The Caldecott Medal is awarded for the most distinguished American picture book for Children.

The Newbury Medal is awarded to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

We are furiously preparing the school for our upcoming musical performance which is on December 9. Big congratulations to all of the actors and stage crew who have been selected—you guys and girls are the heart and soul of this.

Keep your eyes open around the school for more events and info regarding the performance.

Oh, and get your ticket requests in early, there are a limited number of seats available, and you don’t want to be left out!

After our talk in class yesterday, I was feeling discouraged, but not defeated. I know that advertising is a concern on student accessed sites, and I firmly believe that it would be unethical of me to keep this going if I were exposing my students and their families to advertising on this page.

The advertising you have seen was placed by the organization who hosts this service. They were placed there, despite the fact that their own website claims that their blogs are “advertising free”. The issue, however, is that people who are not logged into the service will experience advertising. That means, of course, if you have been accessing the blog from home, you have probably been experiencing advertising. I am sorry about that; I was unaware of this issue until two days ago.

I have written to The CEO of the organization to express my dissatisfaction with this. And have, in the meantime, upgraded the account I am using which will eliminate the ads from the blog. The big downside of this, is that the upgrade fee applies to each blog individually, so for now, I have taken down the Project Gallery until I find another way.

Thank you for your patience and understanding with this issue.

This post is a bit late, but I’ve been a bit busy lately. My apologies. One of these days I’ll be able to post without apologizing about its tardiness first.

We had a fun morning with our kindergarten buddy class helping them decorate their pumpkins. The results were spectacular, as there were lots of creative faces made from all sorts of different materials.

Good work big buddies, your little buddies really enjoyed this activity!

An awesome job was done recently by our student council to plan a great event—our first annual Hallowe’en Carnival!

The only downside of the afternoon was the fact that we couldn’t finish the MarioKart tournament. I think I was on the brink of winning the whole thing.

Learning to use the blog as a medium for communication in the classroom is challenging. I am learning each day what works, and what needs to be improved. One thing that I noticed is that the way I had set up the Project Gallery previously, as a page, people could not comment on each project as it was uploaded. I hope that I have fixed that by giving the Project Gallery its own separate blog and listing it on the side bar in bright red letters. That way, I can upload each project as a separate post, allowing comments on each piece of work individually. The projects are, by the way, looking fantastic—good show everyone!

I will do the same thing for homework shortly—which deserves its own blog—but for now check the homework tab at the top of this page.

I have begun to post student samples of digital poetry in the Project Gallery. I will keep this post current as new work gets added. The first batch looks great, and we’re looking forward to seeing the rest of them as they are completed.

We have been weaving together our writing program with iMovie in the computer lab to create Digital Stories. The form for these stories follows the conventions of the The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown. Students wrote their own “Imporant Thing” story and set it against photographs, added music, and narrated the text over top. The results are very exciting and fun to watch.

I will continue to update these as they are finished.

I’ve been exploring blogging and trying to get my head around it for sometime now. I’m reluctant, as it is a new genre to me, but I have seen some great examples of class blogs in the past few weeks and I’m becoming more excited each day about the possibilities and I want to get this thing up and running—so, here it is!

Purposes

Why should we be blogging the class? Well, for one thing, this can be used as a tool to communicate with one another about what is happening in the class. For instance, homework and school assignments can be posted as they are assigned, due dates listed, and forums begun about those assignments—having trouble with math one night?—check the class blog and see if anyone else is feeling that way too, and help one another get unstuck.

Another reason we can get excited about a class blog is that it will allow us a place to display the work we do, particularly in the computer lab. Mr. Statham and I hope this year to integrate technology into our learning in a full and meaningful way, and having a digital gallery, so to speak, is just the thing we need to celebrate that. Further, we can comment on one anothers’ work and share it with our friends and family.

Also, once we are up and running, probably into term two, we can set up student blogs which will be an awesome way to practice journaling and responding to the things we are learning in school.

I’m very excited about this project, and I’m ready to jump in to it head first. I have a lot to learn about this myself, but I hope that you will join me in my excitement about this learning adventure—sharing what you discover with me and the rest of us along the way—and everything it can offer us to learn and celebrate.