How do you solve a problem like (Hurricane) Maria?

Whew, what a busy day! Until we get the library rolling (starting Monday), Day 7 is a full day of uninterrupted class. This is a great opportunity to get some larger-scale projects completed, but can be exhausting for students. That being said, the class got a lot accomplished today. We are "face and eyes" into our curriculum now in all subject areas, and have laid most of the groundwork for our classroom rules and expectations. I prefer to keep these class guidelines flexible at first, since they seem to have greater effect when students are involved in their development.

Thanks to all those who came to Curriculum night! There's nothing like getting to meet you face-to-face, showcase some of my plans and let you see where your children spend their days. The children were very excited to see the notes left for them by their parents, and it seemed as though some had chatted with their parent(s) about what we were going to be doing this year.

First off, here are some links to sites that I showed you the other day. Many of these are also available in the PowerPoint, Word documents and on the sidebar of this blog.

• kidblog.org : The site we are using for student blogging. Students can play around with it for now (preferably in English), and I will be assigning specific tasks as we go along.
• http://www.glogster.com/ : This site is used to create projects and other fun presentations.
• grade4beachycove.blogspot.com : My site from last year; many pertinent links and tips
• http://www.stormpulse.com/ : This is the site students should use for today's Question du Jour
• The Strangest Sights on Google Earth : A gallery of crazy sights (and sites) as seen via satellite
• http://p4c.org.nz/ : The homepage of Philosophy For Children, a site that has many great ideas and lesson plans for helping students become more critical-thinking and analytical
• Bob's Educational Links : Just one of the many SmartBoard sites I take advantage of

I will continue to add sites throughout the year. Last year, some parents found it useful to create a Favourites folder to keep these links in for quick reference. They are also available (if you use the search tool) on this blog.

Today we spent time talking about weather at length, based on the reading the completed last night. I was happy to see that students had absorbed a fair bit of information and seemed very comfortable with some of the vocabulary we were learning already. We used some sites to track hurricanes and other weather patterns, and watched a video about how tornadoes form. Kudos to Erica, who notice that the direction of rotation is different depending on what type of storm we are looking at.

In Religion, we continued to talk about "Peace Makers". This unit looks at those in our current society and in history who have made extraordinary efforts to create peace and are good examples of how we all strive to participate in our communities. As an intro to the American Civil Rights hero Martin Luther King Jr., we talked about Rosa Parks and wrote a 1st person journal entry. These were very well-done and thoughtful.

We started a fun project today, called Global Children's Challenge. It is a healthy-living initiative that focuses on the use of pedometers to monitor activity in an effort to track and increase our healthy living habits. We will monitor these pedometers as a class and individually, and compare online to the other 120,000 students participating around the world. For that reason, they need to bring these to school each day to record totals.

Tomorrow marks the first turnover of home-reading books and "Words of the Week". Students should bring in their French books that I assigned last week, and I will chat with them and give them a new, more appropriate one. They will have a little assignment for the weekend/Monday that will relate to the book they have just finished.

One last note: I will be preparing a comprehensive Homework DuoTang to go home next week. This will contain details from rubrics and homework policy to schedules, weekly tasks, important dates, etc. I hope this will help students stay organized and avoid unnecessary confusion. Have a great evening, and don't leave your deck chairs outside.