Birdseed Mining

The most traumatic part of the day (for my students) was during read aloud.  That's right.  They convinced me to finish the book today.  We read aloud for 45 minutes!  A lot of them took the opportunity to clean out their crates.  Boy, was there an uproar after I read the last sentence!  They kept trying to think of ways that we could get the book sooner... I had ordered it from the Bookmobile, but they don't have it and the inter-library loan system is getting switched so no new holds can be placed.  So I told the class we'd just have to wait until our copy comes in at B&N.  But... after everyone was started on their Daily 5 rounds, I looked at the New Ulm library to see if they have a copy.  Woohoo! They do!  So I put a hold on it and we'll have it for tomorrow.  After the games today I'm headed in to the library for a "New Adult" book group.  It's this new genre that is geared for college-age and slightly older adults.  Anyway, before that we have two B squad basketball games against Janesville and cheerleading at both.




The 8th graders presented their projects on Asia.  Then they put up a fuss because their Middle East projects and map tests are due very shortly after these ones (test next week).  But once I explained why (we don't spend a long time on the Middle East and we have a basketball tournament on weekend that would give them less time to work on it), they said "oh fine, leave the schedule the way it is." 


To learn more about mining, I had my class mine objects from a pie tin of seeds by using tweezers.  They had ten minutes to get out as much as they could.  Then we did some math to find out how much money they made.  Only a few color beads got put in to represent gold, silver, and copper.  Circle noodles represented iron.  The rice, rocks, and popcorn were waste and not worth any.  Some kids spent all their time looking for beads.  Some spent their time focusing on popcorn or rocks.  Some just tried to get a bunch of everything.  They all had fun.  If their workspace was messy, I gave them a fine that had to be subtracted from their total profit.  I passed out more fines for fighting than I did for messy workspaces.


... Well, the games are nearly over.  The girls lost in a nailbiter.  Janesville pulled off a victory by two points in the last 15 seconds of the game.  The boys are still playing, but we're ahead by about 15.  My cheerleaders were really squirrely in the first game and by the second game they were playing with the plastic of their pompoms and sitting on the ground.  So Mrs. E and I sent them back to sit with their parents and we just did some cheers for halftime.  Ugh, it's just two little girls that don't want to be there, and yet they're still at all the games!  I don't know what we're going to do for our tournament next week.  It's just not fun to be the coach when you have to get after them to stand up and stop touching each other and to smile and to pay attention...