We Made It! Wahoo!!

Wow, it's already Thanksgiving of 2006! Next week is December!?! I'm glad the year is going quickly.

Miraculously, I did not get a coverage today. Since I did two this week already, it was a relief. I have been tired, mentally and physically. I actually put my head on my desk for a few minutes during a prep. Annoying kids in the hallway knocked on my door and ran, to disturb me. Grr.

Today, in talking about audience, I had the students first write a note to a friend, about school. Next I had them write a note to the principal, about school. Then, they were to look at the two notes and see what was different. They wrote down the changes and shared. They noticed that their language changed, that they had to show respect to the adult, that they used a letter structure for the adult, and that they used slang and personal stuff with friends. Very interesting!

I also did a super mini Google lesson, with some old color overheads. I show them how to 'read' the page of search results, so as not to waste time clicking onto a site that won't help them. Namely, I showed them the three parts of each result: the title, the excerpt, and the address; and I told them about understanding the different kinds of suffixes (is that what you call the end of a URL? Hm. I have a feeling that I know, I just can't remember. Who cares, it's vacation now!). As in, this site looks perfect, except it ends in .nz. And I don't care about New Zealand right now, so it's useless. As always, the kids definitely seemed to pay attention, because they've all used the internet a million times and they all use Google already. Hurrah for teaching life skills to children! Even for a couple minutes!

For one of this week's homework assignments, the kids had to think about music they liked and whether the artists were a good influence. Several students wrote something like "Rap is not good because they use fowl language." Heh.

Another assignment had the kids tweaking a fairy tale. Most were not done right and just rewritten normally or whatever. One girl wrote about "Pizzarella," and it was awesome. Instead of going to a ball, she worked hard to go to a big pizza tasting party. There was more, but I forget. Basically, it was very clever and I enjoyed it muchly.

Back to the point....it's vacation time now!! Double hurrah!