We went on some interesting tangents today. The creation story is still our focus in religion (today was the fall into sin). One of the verses had a footnote about the meaning of Eve's name, which jogged one of the 6th graders' memories about the baby name book we have on the shelf. He went and got it so he could look up his name and then everybody else wanted to look up their names too. A lot of them claimed they couldn't find their names in the book... they didn't realize all the girl names were in the front and the boy names were in the back.
I shared the book "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" with the class today too. This guy, Harris Burdick, brought a bunch of pictures to a publisher and said he had stories to go along with each one. The publisher said he should bring the stories the next day. Well, the next day, Harris Burdick didn't show up. And he didn't come the next day or the next. The publisher looked for him, but never found Harris Burdick again. The pictures came with a caption and the title of the story, and each is rather mysterious. So years later, they finally put a book together with the pictures. I'm hoping to add a copy of the book to my class library. Maybe my class will be inspired to write stories to go with the pictures!
This afternoon our focus was on evaluating internet sources. I went over some guidelines on what to look for/questions to ask about the source to see if it's truthful or not. Then I gave the 8th graders a website they were supposed to test if the information was true. Here's the site I gave them: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ We didn't have a whole lot of time to do research. Overall, the boys believed it was true, and the girls found information that proved it was false. I think I'm going to have the boys add to their notes. Their assignment was to look up information about the Principality of Sealand. (Here's a link to a neat website about it: http://www.sealandgov.org/) So, real or not real?
The 5th and 6th graders did nearly the same thing. I decided to use the Tree Octopus website as an example. I think I talked too much; some looked like they were glazing over a bit. I should've just turned them loose to check out the website for themselves. Oh well, live and learn. They were pretty excited coming up with the symbols of Minnesota. They're going to research how our state chose those symbols tomorrow. State bird: loon. State flower: lady slipper. State fish: walleye. State food: morel mushroom. State dessert: blueberry muffin. State butterfly: monarch. State tree: red pine. State gem: agate.
The last thing we did today was play Silly Soccer for recess. Three cones are set up in a big triangle. The class is separated into groups of three. The goal is to keep the ball from hitting your team's cone and get the ball to hit the other two cones. It was pretty fun! Except when everybody ganged up on the green cone team. We were going to stop halfway through and switch up the teams, but I kind of forgot. And then when I did remember, there was only five minutes left. A lot of them said it was the high point of their day and they want to play it again.
Now I'm finishing up a few things at school and then heading home to regroup before sand volleyball tonight. Tonight is our last time playing before the tournament this weekend. We have a doubleheader with games at 7:30 and 8:30.
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