Behind

This morning my class was late for chapel... oops. We walked in partway through the first song.  Time slipped away from me this morning before school.  For one thing, I needed to get the bell songs put in the folders.  Normally the students do that, but we didn't get that finished before Christmas break and that particular song is being played with the school choir.  We sing/play for church two Sundays from now, which doesn't give us a lot of practice time, so I wanted the bell people to play along when the choir practiced after chapel.  So I was already in a crunch for that, and some of the music wasn't in order, and the books weren't in number order, and my kids wanted to say memory work or ask me other questions... so we were a little late to chapel.

The song went all right, but not as well as I was hoping. We used tone chimes, which threw some of them off. The song is easy enough, but some of them didn't realize that they should be playing half notes instead of quarter notes.  So we'll probably need to take bell time to practice their song too.  The other half of the bell students are playing a different song. 

The 7th and 8th graders presented their projects today.  We actually got through everyone in the hour.  Normally we have a study hall on Wednesday for part of the time they're with me, but they voted to just get all the presenting finished today.  At the end of the hour, there were still two people to go, so we called Mr. E's room to see if we could go 15min extra today.  Sure! And so we got everyone in.

A bunch of them forgot to include their works cited page. If they get it in before the bell rings tomorrow morning, it won't be late and their grade won't be docked.  One boy came back after school was out to show me his sources on his laptop.  His presentation had been about European coins; he actually brought in some coins his stepdad had collected from his time stationed in Europe.  This student's favorite coin was a 500 lire coin from Italy.  It is pretty neat! He said the dots at the top of the coin represented the year of the coin.  He didn't know how they could figure out the year from all the dots, so we spent some time researching.  It turns out the dots are actually braille! And the braille states the value of the coin.  So we looked up the braille alphabet and translated the dots, and lo and behold it was the value of the coin. However, two letters were in front of the number: kl.#500. is the exact translation.  We figured that the "l" stands for lire, but no matter where we searched, we could not figure out what the "k" stands for.  We must've looked for at least 45 minutes. Finally we found a world coin online forum thing and the student created an account so he could ask the question. I hope someone answers it!