Truck Loaded

Hello,

The school community started the day packing the back of a truck with all of the food collected during our Food Collection Drive.  Ms. D'Agostino leads a school-wide program through our physical education classes.  It took us a good half hour to stuff the truck.  All of the food will be going to a local food bank.  Thank you for your donations.

We have started eliminating animals for possible adoption through our Holiday Madness Bracket Challenge.  Each student nominated an animal for adoption through World Wildlife Federation's Adopt-An-Animal program.  I created a giant single elimination tournament bracket on our back white board.  Every day we will hear from a couple of students on why we should adopt their animal choice and then we vote.  Two animals will be eliminated a day.  Yesterday, in close voting, the Gray Wolf took down the Red Panda and the Sea Turtle took down the Giraffe.  Today was a bad day for big cats and had two blowouts: (15-3 in both) Arctic Hare crushed the Cheetah and the Saola outdistanced the Clouded Leopard.  We will find out tomorrow who will win between the Three-Toed Sloth and the Arctic Fox, and between the defending champion, Amur Leopard, and the Emperor Penguin.

We got back into the computer room to finish up our explorer cards.  I think half of the class finished.  We have some more work to do. 

The early release day delivered us an early math class.  We are focusing on being able to draw a bar model for simple equations and word problems.  The Bowdoin volunteers were a huge help today, making it able for students who needed it to get one on one instruction.  Give your kids a problem, like 24 divided by 6, or 210 minus 130.  They should be able to give you a nice, visual model.

Back to full days tomorrow.  I'd much rather be here with a room full of kids than a room full of adults.  You can draw your own conclusions.

Thanks for reading,
Mr. Shea