Tag Archives: literacy

Back to class in June

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Updated, June 3

Our weekly online meetings will take place on Wednesdays in MS Teams. Before our next meeting, please read Gray Wolf’s Search with Mr Tsougrianis and explore these ideas after reading/listening. Then please leave a comment ON MR TSOUGRIANIS’S BLOG.

Please see the list of and ongoing assigned activities to work on over the rest of this week. Please also have a listen to “Sometimes a Dream Needs a Push“. I’ll be interested to know what you think of the father’s reaction to Chris’s dream, whether you think it is harder for Chris or for his dad and what you think about how they are reacting to hardship.

Canada Wc-1A (1950s)
It’s the first week of June. Where I lived when I was in elementary school long ago, the first week of June would have been our last week of the school year, so it seems more than a little odd to be writing about heading back to school right now, but I suppose that’s not all that’s a litttle out of the ordinary at the moment.

We welcome many of our students back to classrooms today while the rest will continue working from home. With this mix of working partially in person and partially from home, our schedules will change. We will move our weekly online meetings for the whole class to Wednesday mornings. I will continue to support students with their work and their questions, but I will not be able to be available for as many open drop-in sessions online. As ever, scheduled meetings will be found in our Teams calendar.

There will be a few new tasks to tackle this week, but for the moment, for those wtill working from home, taking some time to revisit unfinished comments, writing, problems and music tasks from the last week or two would be time wisely spent.

I hope to see all of you, via one means or another, very soon indeed!

We could all use a laugh

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Our special guest at our recent class meeting brought some good stories, positive messages and more than a couple of good laughs. That is something we could all use: a regular healthy dose of smiles and laughter. That’s not news to six-year-old Callaghan McLaughlin from Saanich, B.C., whom we read about recently with his joke stand spreading #CovidKindness. And it made me smile again to read about how some Calgary high school students have started a joke telephone hotline.

Intending to give a little boost to the spirit and spread a little joy to seniors currently isolated at home, the teens have recorded jokes and stories along with positive messages and poems which folks can listen to over the phone. They’ve called it the Joy4ALL Project and included “JOY4ALL” in the toll-free phone number. What a wonderful idea! And it has gained some big-time attention and praise from big-time comedy. James Corden, the host of The Late Show on CBS, featured the teens’ Joy4All project in one of his segments. He also seems to have recruited comedy star Billy Crystal to lend his talents to the teens’ efforts by recording a couple of jokes for the hotline.

We are currently working on writing and recording some poetry, and it’s no surprise that the funnier verses tend to be our favourites. Why shouldn’t we record ourselves reading a few more of these? Members of our current class are hereby challenged to find a joke or funny poem to add to your recordings (scroll through some of our old favourite verses found on the poetry foundation site and you can search there for amusing work by Jack Prelutsky, Kenn Nesbitt, & Shel Silverstein for starters).

Have you got a good joke to share (or a real groaner)? Actor, author and mathematician, Danica McKellar, tweeted this image based on a well-worn math joke. Do you know it, or can you take a guess at what it is? Leave your guess or another joke or short humourous verse in a comment.

Blast from the past

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I hope that everyone will be able to make it to our class meeting, even with its move to MONDAY MORNING this week. I am especially looking forward to this meeting because we will be joined by special guest and Dvision 3 alumnus, Roshen Jaswal, who was in grade 6 when he was last a student in our room. Roshen has kindly kept in touch over the years since and has agreed to join us to share some memories and a little of his story of what life has been like for him after surviving Division 3.

As you continue working on various activities (some new and some extending from last week), I also want to draw your attention to a couple of stories that I have come across in the news this week about two of the most notable and most inspiring individuals from our province who set out to bring attention to how we can overcome our own challenges and can help improve the lives of others when we join together.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope. You may have heard how Addidas, the company who helped sponsor Terry’s run 40 years ago by providing him with shoes (he needed a lot of shoes!) released a special, limited edition shoe last week modelled after the runners Terry wore with all proceeds going to the Terry Fox Foundation. The shoes sold out online in mere minutes. These photos tell the story well, check them out.

Rick Hansen
Rick Hanson is marking the 35th anniversary of his Man in Motion tour (when he travelled all the way around the world in his wheelchair to raise funds and awareness for accessibility and spinal cord injury research) by donating almost 2000 pieces of memorabilia from his tour to the Canadian History Museum. In his interview with CBC’s On the Coast, Rick talks about memories of the tour, his friendship with Terry Fox and their wheelchair basketball games together and how he carried a small statue of Terry with him on his tour to help him maintain his spirits and determination.

As we continue working through our current situation and conquering all our collective and individual obstacles, I hope we might be once again inspired by these individuals, and maybe not just because their challenges and their successes seem so great (which they were and are) but because their determination and ultimately their success came out of the desire to do good for others. We CAN get there faster if we all move together.

Friday Finish

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I’m hoping now that Friday’s come
You’ve found all that you seek
And did what needed to get done
To wrap up this (short) week

We read of more than just one kid
Inspired to create
Some #CovidKindness acts they did
To make these days feel great

In games of chance you used your skill
And calculated odds
Your bingo play made buckets fill
Creating smiles and nods

The words of poets whom you’ve read
To help with writing verse
Word play, you’ll see (What’s that you said?)
It’s FUN! (or could be worse).

That video not finished yet?
There’s time left on the clock
Shoot a few seconds: Ready. Set.
And send me (not TikTok).

Let’s wrap this up; it’s going fine
One more request from me
In comments, YOU write the next line
____ ______ ____ ______ ____ ______

 

What would you do if you could read minds?

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Update for Friday, May 15th

Many interesting thoughts & opinions about what folks think about whether being able to read minds would be a good power to have and what people might do with that power have been shared in conversation elsewhere. I’m updating this post rather than starting a new one so we can finish gathering more of your ideas here. Please leave a reply to add your thoughts to the comments (or add to your previous comment). Students may want to return to this to add a comment after listening to part 2 of the story and doing some reflection (the links and other updates will be in the updated list of this week’s assigned activities).

Enjoy Victoria Day.

We’ve started the short story, ‘Sevety-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents’ by Kwame Alexander, and Monk seems thinks he can hear what people are thinking.

If it’s true
(and maybe it is)
Monk’s a mind-reader!

Would YOU want the power to read others’ thoughts? What would you do with it? Leave your responses as a comment, but make sure you’ve listened to the introduction and part 1 of the story (see our this week’s assigned activities for the links). Then spend some more time today making more progress on those projects. I’ll be glad to see everyone for our class circle Thursday afternoon.

What makes someone interesting?

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We are going to look at another interesting short story. Before listening to the introduction to the story below, please complete this pre-reading questionnaire. After submitting your responses, go on to listen to the introduction (as read by the story’s author).

When you’ve finished, please respond to the reflection questions here.

Then please revisit our list of assigned activities for this week to check your progress on ongoing projects and look for a new task for your designing skills. You’ll also find a link to the next part of the story.