Frigid

I hate these days below zero... my classroom is garbage at holding heat, so it's been chilly in here all day. Joe is hunkered under his heat lamp and he's not moving! He hasn't even come out to eat these past two days. Tomorrow doesn't sound much better. A high of 7 degrees with a -27 windchill. Blech. I wonder if school will be late tomorrow. Probably not since today was colder.

After school's cleaning session was not as productive as I'd hoped, but we did move the couch and the sink and the green house. I have half a lab table now; we condensed all the plants on one end and wiped the table off. Much neater! The computer station needs work still. I'm not sold on the couch's location. I also want to move the spinny book racks to where the couch used to be. That kind of cuts down on our bookshelf space though. Maybe I should get another spinning rack. Or I could get a short double sided bookshelf that they could sit on. I need to mull it a bit. 

The 7-8th graders weren't happy with their Africa test grades and don't like how it will effect their quarter two grades. Since I don't give out extra credit (do your work well the first time!), we came up with a few projects our ancient history class can do. One is to make a time travel brochure for one of the Asian empires/dynasties we've been learning about. They also convinced me we should watch the Disney movie Mulan (animated) and analyze how historically accurate it is. They were all on board, so we're going to give it a shot tomorrow. I did preresearch and found a blog post that points out some True/False bits of history in it. That'll be a good starting point for the movie. 

They also want to learn Russian history. Huh, okay. I never learned a ton of Russian history, so we'll be learning it together I guess. We'll probably save that for later in the year when we move on to Europe. Over the summer I wanted to revamp this ancient history curriculum to be project based. I ran out of time/energy, so if they come up with ideas, we can tweak the plan as we go!