What I learned at school today

Dear Parent of the Average Child, I'm sorry. Your child is wonderful.  She is always at school on time, does her homework most everyday, works well on her own and is patient with those around her.  I really wanted  to go tell your daughter how proud of her I was of the work she was doing today. I was about to but you see I had a young girl  over in the corner crying because she hadn't had breakfast. Another was tromping around the classroom in winter boots. It's May. When I asked her to change she told me she didn't have any other shoes. I needed to send them and my CEA down to the office to see if we had some food and any extra shoes in lost and found.  Oh and over in the other corner there was a  boy screaming at the top of his lungs because, well no one is sure why. He is on a list to see a specialist, they hope to have a plan in place for him soon. Of course it has been 3 months, but the specialist teacher is overworked and only at our school a few days

We had a happy accident happen in Mme Hawtree's grade 1 class this week.  We have special guest come and speak to us about our feelings and thought and the words that we say. She used thought bubbles and speech bubbles to show the difference between the things we say and the things we think. Later that day in science we were talking about predicting.  I asked the students to pick 3 items in the classroom and predict if they would roll or slide or do both. After they had made their prediction they were suppose to test the item and then record their prediction and what actually happened in their science journals. One of my bright stars had a suggestion... "We could use thought bubbles for what we think will happen and speech bubbles to show what actually happened!"  Many of my students ran with this idea.  It became very clear for me and the student what was their guess and what was their prediction. Using bubbles to show thinking Predicting is often a tricky