So things are pretty low key this weekend. John and I tried going out for a winter walk, but despite the warm-up it's slippy and icy, so we're not even going to do that.

I'm sitting here instead reading Silver Birch books. The Silver Birch Award is a special honour given to Canadian writers of children's books. Ten fiction and ten non-fiction books ( Read more... )

Yay, I'm very happy with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto right now. We have the two Gr. 4 classes booked in for a class trip next Friday in connection with our Rocks and Minerals unit in Science. The students have a classroom lesson at the museum first where they get lots of hands-on experience with rocks and a chance to do experiments and ( Read more... )

They brought a cool young guy into our school a few weeks back to demonstrate the game/sport of Speed Stacking and it has now become the kids' most popular obsession. The new speed stacking club has attracted over a hundred students from Gr. 1 to 8, so many that the teacher supervisors have split the club up by division over three lunch hour ( Read more... )

So it's winter and cold and John and I aren't inclined to be out doing much walking or hiking so for exercise we've pulled out the Wii system again and started dancing to the "Just Dance" programs again. We bought them last winter just for that purpose, to have something to exercise with in the cold weather. It's still a lot of fun and we're ( Read more... )

The photo below the link has been on our school board's website all week, which is kinda fun since I'm in the crowd ( Read more... )

It is kind of sad that despite being a teacher I've never become very good at putting together PowerPoint presentations. The reality is that in almost any group activity that I've ever been involved in that needed a PowerPoint show there's always been some other teacher in the group with more experience at doing such things than me and ends up ( Read more... )

Report cards are done. Yay. You know I was thinking the other day that I've written 80 or so sets of report cards in my career, but they never really get any easier. Well, except for the fact that they are done on the computer now. Back in the mid-eighties, when I started teaching, every report card had to be written by hand, which was tiring and ( Read more... )

My students were complaining today about having too much homework and I was giving them a hard time about it. During the exchange a boy asked me if I got lots of homework when I was in Gr. 4. I told him sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't, just like them. And then I told him that on the days I -didn't- get homework I'd go home and read a book ( Read more... )

So they have this really cool event held every year called Music Monday, which is an initiative to promote the arts, especially music, in elementary schools and high schools across Canada. The event focuses around taking a single song, this year a song called "Tomorrow Is Coming" by Luke Doucet, written especially for the event, and getting as many ( Read more... )

Like most jobs, teaching tends to be a day-to-day affair. You worry about some fight in the schoolyard, you juggle lessons to prepare the students for their next test, you check homework. The kids come into your hands in September and move on their way in June and it's with rare exception that you get to know any long lasting influence you may have ( Read more... )