So much for the goal of catching up on the blog over break! Two weeks off school... 4 days of that spent at school... 2 working with the other 7th grade teachers on social studies curriculum - the other 2 doing my stuff, although I spend so much time on social studies it really does not seem worthwhile. I only teach 1 section of SS, and 3 of math and the SS work is split up between the 3 teachers.... so why do I end up spending so much time prepping for that class???

One thing really worthwhile from one of our SS days - we talked a lot about 7th grade camp. Planning for some new classes/adaptations of old ones - to make them more aligned to our curriculum. For example: the outdoor cooking class has traditionally been done with students cooking over a campfire, making some tasty treat like orange cake or baked apples. We want to continue this class - it is a favorite with the kids and worthwhile... but we want to try cookiing something like the colonial people would have cooked - perhaps vegetable soup and johnny cakes. We also talked about a tie-dye class using natural foods to make the dyes - "tie-dye the colonial way". We also talked about potential kids who will not be able to go. Unfortunately our intial list is of 22 students. WOW!! That is of about 90 total. Of course, many of those will end up going, but at this point, we have legitimate concerns about them for various reasons: attitude, attendance, tardies, out & out meaness... this is an interesting group we have this year.

Math this first week after break should be fun for me and the kids. We are making 3-D polygons - cubes, tetrahedral pyramids, square pyramids, dodecahedrons, octahedrons, etc.. I hope students come away with several skills - able to accurately create 3-D models, draw various shapes given directions, draw bisectors, apply their measuring lengths and angles skills to a new situation, explore sides, vertices, edges of various models. I also plan for them to do some journaling about the actual making of these models - the process, what they learn...

It's a new year... let's pray it is a good one!