Strange Days Indeed

Today was a really good day. We had a really nice Social Studies history lesson first of all. I love it when the kids get into the history lessons--not the reading right out of the book, but the meat of the real stories behind the history. Of course, I love that part of it too, so it's probably just that I love seeing them share my interests. I tend to be kind of a history cheerleader, so it probably rubs off a little bit. Also, some great things came from Math today (they all seem eager to retake the test--and believe me, many of them will want to).

Earlier in the semester, we set some goals for what I wanted to get done in language arts, particularly grammar. We are almost there. I'm having the students do some review work with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I don't want my class to be one of the ones that I hear about from the middle school teachers that doesn't know their parts of speech, the difference between a subject and predicate, and how to use punctuation. I'm happy to let you know that they can tell what a clause is and whether you need a conjunction or just a comma/conjunction.

You know, I'm really happy with how well these students are able to hold all of this information, do all of these things, and still function as people after school. We ask quite a bit out of them (and I say this "we" collectively), and they show us every day that they can rise to the occasion.

Remember: Tomorrow the kids should be wearing their Camp Woodbrook t-shirts. I think you'll really like this show. They did a great job at rehearsing today.

Lastly, we met with our groups for the books for the last time today. The boys wrote a short essay on Hatchet, and from what I've seen, they look pretty good. I've said it before, but this is quite possibly the manliest book I've ever read, and it was a lot of fun to read it in an "all-man" group. When we were done, I asked them some gross-out "Would You Rather" questions and they thought that was pretty funny. They were a little disappointed that I wouldn't let them run outside and roll around in the snow without their coats on (as manly as that would have been), but they seemed to like Plan B well enough.

Doggone it! I just realized that not only yesterday was I going to talk about Pearl Harbor (anniversary, you know), but today I was going to talk about that and John Lennon. Today was crammed pretty full, and I forgot both. Tomorrow looks like it will be even worse, but I'll do my best to talk about both of those things. Whoops!