A busy day!

The boys and girls were busy today! Would you believe today was the 41st day of school? And um, would you also believe that a Kindergardener asked me if I'm a teenager? Talk about a five-star Tuesday! 

This morning, we had a drama lesson with Mrs. Hill, where the boys and girls learned all about the plot of a story. 

Then we had a Social Studies lesson and talked about the different jobs that had to be done in the First Nations village. The students were surprised to learn that jobs were divided into "boys jobs" and "girls jobs". We all agreed that in 2014, anyone can do any job, regardless of whether they're a boy or a girl. I was really impressed when after just a brief lesson on the features of the village, students were able to brainstorm with their elbow partners and identify jobs that had to be done in order to keep a village running smoothly.

In Math, we jumped ahead and talked about even and odd numbers. We still have to go back and do some work with number lines, but the lesson on even and odd numbers is a good one and with the gray, gloominess of the day, I thought it was the perfect day for some fun(and a new Math video-coming soon!).  

At Evening Meeting, we began a new novel. It's called Swindle by Gordon Korman and even though it gets off to a slow start, it's well worth the read! It's a great opportunity to talk about the risk we all take if we abandon a book too soon because we find it boring.  

We've talked earlier in the year about reasons why good readers abandon books and yes, "it's boring" is one of them, but the bigger go-ahead-and-abandon-it rules are: 

• it's too easy/too hard
• I'm having trouble with too many of the words 
• there are too many characters
• it's too scary for me 
• I don't like the subject matter after all
• I've read other books that are very similar (which could make it boring)

In Morning Message we've been talking about bullet points. Soon we'll be looking at non-fiction texts and through Morning Message, I can give the boys and girls lots of creative experiences with a variety of non-fiction text features such as bullet points. Students are learning about our "Character of the month": Turkey Lurkey. I used bullet points to tell the kids some facts about him.  

And there you have it! Talk about a busy day! I always think we put in two hours for every one hour we spend here at school, but is it possible that we did a three-for-one today?