I’m wondering how many of the students will blog about the “fire” at St. Bernard on Thursday, Jan. 12….it wasn’t a drill!

• Go to the classroom website.  CLICK on “Visit our classroom blog” above the surfer’s head.

• You should now be on the Classroom Blog page (Miss Brooks’ class).  See the log in?  CLICK on it!

• It’s telling you to select your name, isn’t it?  Go ahead!  Find yourself in the list of usernames.  I’m the Head lifeguard.  Can you figure out who you are?

• Now you need a password.  It’s p******s.

• The page moved!  If you look at the black band at the top, you will see yourself logged in.  Then it says “Control Panel”.  CLICK THAT!

• This is the dashboard.  Click on “NEW POST” to let yourself type your blog.

Characteristics of a Blog

–Title
–Image
–Your thoughts and opinions about things that are RELEVANT ~ that means your writing has to be connected to what we are doing and appropriate!
–Correct grammar and spelling!  Other people are reading this!
–Date (don’t worry about including it….when you are done, the blog will automatically date your post!)

–PUBLISH (that’s the blue button to the right!)

An update on our Math Buddies:

We received our first package from Safety Harbor, Florida in late October.  The buddy was “Winter” from the movie “Dolphin Tale”.  Mrs. Schawang’s Gr 5 students at Espiritu Santo were lucky enough to be invited to the premiere of the movie as the real Winter is a resident of nearby Clear water!

We found many similarities between their school and ours.  The obvious is that we both attend Catholic school, although the students at Espiritu Santo wear uniforms.  We both had 28 students (at the time) and 4 wore glasses.  We were surprised that football was NOT their favourite sport but hockey wasn’t ours so I guess that we shouldn’t stereotype!

A little over a week ago, we received our second math buddy package from “sweet, home Alabama”.  Mrs. Reasner’s Grade 5 class hails from Huntsville which is about 4 hours from their state capital of Mobile.  That is similar to us because Windsor is about a 4 hour drive from our provincial capital of Toronto.

We are always interested in the sports that these classes like best and again, it wasn’t football!  Baseball or softball were the most popular!

The grade 5s are on a mission to work with Agent Bones from Planet CA4 (that’s Planet Calcium)  to help the Bonehead People build stronger bones. 

This program involves comics, announcements and Public Service ad creations!  Check our website for more information.

How can you spend a whole day with only OREOs as your teaching tool?  Watch the above YouTube video which proves how tempting a treat this cookie really is!

We started our day in the gym playing 2 of NBC’s Minute to Win It games.  Next, we headed back to the classroom for some Science experiments.  We did not get to test if an OREO floated in milk (the time flew by!), but we were able to measure if Double Stuf had double the white stuff than an Original OREO (it didn’t) and tested to see if the commercial‘s statement that “kids’ll eat the middle of an OREO first” was true (it wasn’t–1 kid didn’t eat the OREO, 7 ate the middle first, 9 ate the outside first and 9 bit into the whole cookie).  After recess and a snack (other than OREOs), we did a blind taste test to see if we could tell which was the Original OREO if tasting it and a low-fat variety.  Half the class tasted correctly.  Nathan said, “I’ve eaten a lot of OREOs in my lifetime and “B” just tasted different than all those OREOs.”  He may have a career as a chef in the future!  Most of the kids agreed that American OREOs tasted different than our Canadian ones (which contain coconut oil).  Something about their chocolate being harder and creme being too soft.

After lunch, we did the actual online project, the whole reason for the day.  Seth stacked the most OREOs (33), Shannon came in 2nd (29) and Katie came in 3rd (28).  Did you know that they all worked with the same cookies and at the same table?  Either those cookies are lucky are that group had mad skills!  Our class averaged 22 cookies.

Since we still had some time before afternoon recess and clearly we hadn’t eaten enough OREOs at this point (kidding!), we had a “Who can lick the middle of a Double Stuf the fastest” Contest.  Bella was the winner!  Deserving a celebration, someone put the CD player on to Weird Al’s “The White Stuff” and others began a conga line dance party!

With about 13 minutes left, we took all the used OREOs that we had saved throughout the day and kids began to create OREO art.

We must apologize to Madame Kobti because we’re sure that all the excitement from the day (not to mention the sugar) made it difficult to learn during French which was last period of the day.  Check our class website for pictures that captured our day!