January 30

It's the beginning of the fourth week and I'm wondering where the first three weeks have gone. Things are continuing to go great. We've received our pen pal letters so there has been quite the buzz about that in the classroom. This morning I did a review grammar lesson because I thought they needed a little review before writing their second letters. I introduced them to D.O.L (Daily Oral Language) which was used in many of the schools that I observed back at home and it was something that I did all through grade school. What I did was I put four sentences on the board and had them read them, decide if they were correct, and then write them correctly. I then asked for volunteers to come up and correct each sentence. The students really enjoyed this and were all willing to participate. I then used the sentences as references and talked about the various parts of speech, synonyms, homophones, and punctuation. They did very well and asked a lot of questions. We then did a lot of R.E. work where we talked about respect. We played a game in which the students picked groups of 4 or 5 and then were read about 10 different occupations and they were to rank them from 1 to 10 as to how valuable they thought they were in the community. The group was then given a game board and told that whenever they landed on a specific occupation they were to take the amount of counters out that they had ranked the occupation. The person with the most counters was the winner. We then discussed each occupation and it was interesting that many of the groups had ranked a garbage collector as a 1 or 2 but after talking it through we found them to be quite valuable and someone who we need to give more respect to. The students seemed to get a lot out of it which is very important, especially in this class because they have had problems with getting along with others. After lunch I handed out the pen pal letters and they were able to have a little bit to read them over with their partner. They were so excited and couldn't wait to share their letter with everyone. I then had them write their replies in their notebooks. Once finished they had to find another group to switch with and peer review each others. It worked out very well and many of them kept in mind what we had talked about in the morning. While they were working on writing their letters, I took pictures of each group and we are going to attach these pictures to our letters. Tomorrow is going to be an out of the ordinary day. The students have swimming in the morning, maths, and then in the afternoon someone will be coming in to talk about violence and theft. On Thursday we will have the opportunity to type up our pen pal letters. I will also be doing an imaginative writing lesson with the students. The students have been doing a great job with their imaginative writing and have written some awesome pieces. Each student will be able to choose one piece of writing and we will be putting it on one of our bulletin boards.

This last weekend, Kim and I travelled to Kelso and got to see the Floors Castle. It was amazing! A duke lives there, I guess he's somehow related to the queen. We weren't able to go inside but since Kim's host family runs one of their farms we were able to get pretty close to the castle. We have also finalized our London/Paris trip and we will be leaving next week during the school's long break. We are really looking forward to this!