November No More!

And just like that, November is gone! It felt very surreal changing over the classroom calendar and putting
up Hunnuka, Christmas, and Quanza on Friday afternoon. In a blink of an eye, we will be in 2020! E 109
has been an even busier room this week as it has become the home base for all intermediate school
spirit wear sales. The hope is to have all the clothing to the kids before the holidays and due to the OSSTF
strike on Wednesday, we will be placing our order on Tuesday. If you have a clothing order that you
would like before the holidays then please get your paper orders in by Tuesday, December 3rd and online
orders in by Monday, December 2nd. Any orders that come in after will be filled but will be delivered in the
new year.

Link to order clothing online: https://avonmaitland.schoolcashonline.com/ 

The kids continue to build their reading stamina during our daily independent reading. I love how students
have gotten into the swing of really owning their learning through the choice of novels they read and reading
response menu options. This week we are adding a new assignment to the creative writing section of
independent reading response choice menu thanks to Ben! He created a “Choose Your Own Adventure”
slide deck based on the themes from his novel Fly Boy by Eric Walters. 78 had fun working their way through
his story, trying to make the right choices so that they could survive as a WWII pilot. The kids have also started to work
on vocabulary building by keeping track of new words that they come across in their independent reading. After
each reading session, we share new words or phrases that we noticed as readers. 

We read an article from Global News that inspired us to send cards to Canadian military service members
who will be overseas for the holidays. We worked our way through the writing process and by the end of the
week I was able to post the thoughtful and touching cards that I know will bring smiles to the faces of the women
and men who are serving our country overseas.
Link to Global News Article

78 and 8D kiddos handwriting cards to Canadian Service personnel 

We have also spent this week learning about different literary devices (similes, metaphors, alliteration,

onomatopoeia, oxymorons, personification, and imagery) and word choice. We will be working to notice
these stylistic devices in the books we read and include them in the pieces that we write. We also spent
time this week working on the narrative scene assignment that is due next Wednesday. Once we have
mastered the scene we will move to the creation of digital stories.

Mid November News!

Here we are again with another 2 for 1 blog post. Last week my work-life balance was upset by
a hockey tournament in Burlington. I missed my early Saturday morning writing session to cheer
on Malcolm and his teammates in a freezing cold arena. #hockeymom

Last week both classes participated in what I thought was going to be a global twitter chat but
turned out to just be us and French immersion kids from the Ottawa Carlton board. I’m putting
my feelers out for a better opportunity to collaborate with other students in the future. Each
group shared their ideas for what their vision for schools of the future will be like. To see more
check out #NPDLfutureschools on Twitter.

In the land of non-fiction, we tackled the topic of teen vaping. This is a very timely article as the
kids all agreed that this was a problem and that vaping is something that students of MDHS
definitely do. We had some great discussions in both classes where students shared their
thoughts and opinions about why they think that this dangerous trend is on the rise. They also
worked in small groups and took on the role of “Premier of Ontario” to develop regulations for
the e-cigarette industry. 

We have launched the next writing assignment in our narrative unit. We took the time to review
the essential elements of stories. We did a deep dive into how dialogue can enhance their stories
and grammar mechanics behind the use of quotation marks. Students should have completed the
“Understanding Dialogue” lessons assigned on noredink.com by the end of this week.

The next writing assignment has been posted in Showbie and we had a chance to co-create the
rubric that we will be using to assess this work. Students were reminded that the rubrics are
always given at the beginning of assessed tasks so that they know how they can achieve their
absolute best. Students need to make sure that they are submitting ALL stages of the writing
process. We also talked about the importance of prewriting and the difference between
brainstorming and planning.

Narrative Scene Assignment from Showbie: 

You know that stories are built on scenes that contain sensory details of setting, characters, and
action. All of this detail is essential to help the reader experience the moment.

Your mission is to craft ONE scene. Show a moment in time (scene) through the use of sensory
details (see, taste, hear, feel, smell) to help readers imagine and live inside the experiences of
those settings.

• Balance show and tell to establish the pace of the scene and to show readers what matters.

• Use dialogue to reveal characters both in what is said and through the words of other characters

• Use word choice to create a believable, consistent voice for the narrator of the scene.

We had a ton of kids away on Friday making it hard to teach a new lesson so I changed
up my original plans and we took advantage of all the different language games I’ve got.
We played Scrabble, Upwords, Bananagrams, Boggle, Scategories, and Pictionary. We
also accessed some great digital games like Camelion, Wordscapes, and Wordstacks.
I have o admit, it was a nice way to end the week!

Language Game Day!

Collaboration is the Name of the Game!

Collaboration was the name of the game this week in room E109. Both classes spent a lot of time this week preparing for the global twitter chat that we will be taking part in. I love that we are going to have so many different responses to the prompt, What should learning look like in schools of the future? Every day students were reminded what it takes to work well with others and reflected on their abilities as members of their teams.

                                                         G - Give encouragement
                                                         R - Respect on another
                                                         O - On task (stay)
                                                         U - Use quiet voices
                                                         P - Participate actively
                                                         S - Stay in our groups

We also made time to hone our writing skills with more Quickwrites inspired by beautiful mentor texts. This week we looked at an excerpt from the Book of Awsome and read the poem I Am From by George Ella Lyon. 

Happy Halloweek!

And just like that, we have two months of school under our belts! MDHS was the place to be this week
with all of our Halloweek dress-up opportunities. We also had our first intermediate dance and all of the
ghosts and goblins came to play! 

With both classes embarking on collaborative efforts to envision what learning will look like in schools of
the future, we started the week learning about what it means to be a good collaborator. We discussed
that this is one of the soft skills that are so important to possess that will serve them well for the rest of
their lives.  One aspect of being a good collaborator is having a solid awareness of who you are as a
learner and what you bring to the table when you are working with others. To help get a better
understanding of who they are, the students took a student aptitude test to gain insights into their
personalities using www.studentaptitude.com.

As part of a global deep learning task, we will be taking part in a Twitter chat with students from New

Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Uruguay, and the United States on November 11th and 12th.
Students will be sharing their responses to the prompt: What should learning look like in the schools of
the future?  I’m very excited about the opportunity to collaborate with students from across the world who
are also part of the deep learning community. 

This week we were in the routine of sharing novel responses, independently reading while I hold student

conferences followed by quickwrites where we read a mentor text to inspires us, write for 5 minutes,
revise our work and then share. We co-created the success criteria for our Future Schools collaborative
work and then the students worked to follow our action plan.