One Teacher's Adventures

Last week, my Grade 8 Science kids completed a lab to observe the characteristics of living things.  In it, they compared dry yeast and salt, then put each into apple juice to observe the reactions.  The first step in the lab was to describe the dry yeast and salt in a table, looking at the colour, size, texture, and shape of each. When I looked over the lab reports my kids had turned in, I was more than a little disappointed with their observations.  I had more than half of the class simply writing the word "small" for size of the grains, and I even had about 5 or 6 kids write "salty" for the texture of the salt!  This made me realize that I hadn't given them enough clarification on what was acceptable, scientific language for observations.  To help them understand the level of description I wanted, we completed a simple activity.  We went outside, and I asked each student to find a leaf.  We have a beautiful maple tree that takes up a large ...

While my first day back to school with the kids is tomorrow, the staff had our official start day last Thursday.  In our district, we have a School Planning Day built into the calendar, usually in the second or third week of classes.  This year, it falls on September 21.  Most schools, however, decide to do the planning day before classes start - which makes a lot more sense! I'm switching schools (again) this year, and my new school decided to hold our planning day off site at a salmon enhancement centre.  Although the majority of the day was spent in grade group meetings, part of the day was dedicated to touring the facility and taking in the beauty of the surroundings.  We took a walk through some of the trails and breathtaking doesn't begin to describe the beauty.  These pictures do not do it justice! This is a salmon ladder.  It has run dry because our summer was so dry.  Hopefully, we will have more rain and the stream will connec...