Test Number Two

Hello everybody, sorry I've been away for so long. I woke up with a sore throat last Friday morning and spent the vast majority of my weekend dividing my time between sleeping and eating tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. I finally feel like I'm back to some semblance of my normal self this morning (Wednesday) and realized I haven't updated this page in quite a while. As most of you have probably noticed the students were required to turn in their lab report packets for the Rocket Project yesterday. I haven't had the opportunity yet to look through them, but I'm sure they all did a wonderful job. Most of you are also (hopefully) aware by now that we will be having our second math test this Friday. We're spending this entire week reviewing the concepts we've covered sinve the last test, although our math tests are cumulative, so the students should not be surprised to see problems from the entire year so far on the test. Finally, it looks like we're delaying our Free Market Friday yet again. This time the reasons stem from a crowded weekly schedule next week with short wednesday and the Tuesday field trip. As of right now, it looks like Free Market Friday will actually take place on Tuesday the 8th of November, but you should wait unti lyou get an e-mail from Ms. Looney or one of our room parents before quoting me on that. So that's what we've been up to around here, we do have a special guest visitor today who is going to show some slides of the King Tut exhibit apparently, so maybe I'll try to have a student or two blog that experience later this morning. Bye for now, -Mr. H

Student Led Conferences

Dear Parents, Ms. Looney and I have set up an online calendar (http://my.calendars.net/hartooney/) of dates and times for student led conferences to occur. Please check it out and make sure that you are able to attend the time we have scheduled you for. We've also elected to hold student led conferences this semester instead of the more traditional parent-teacher conferences. While the student led portion of the conference will last for only five minutes, it will afford your children the opportunity to reflect and communicate about their learning at HTM thus far and to formulate goals for the remainder of the year. Ms. Looney and I will conclude each conference with about five minutes of traditional parent/teacher time to address any questions or concerns that may have arisen in the year to date, but because we are each only meeting with half of our total students during this conference time, those parents who have their conference with me and wish to conference with Ms. Looney as well will need to schedule a private time to speak with her either before or after school (the strategy is the same in the inverse situation, of course).
P.S. Those parents who bring snacks and treats for their weary teachers to enjoy during conference time will not be punished for doing so. -Mr. H

Rocket Mania

Hello everybody! I hope you all had a good three day weekend. Shame about the Chargers, though I still think they can make the playoffs. I'm writing today because we began Rocket Week just a few minutes ago and your students are likely to bring home quite a bit of work as far as constructing, changing and testing rockets. They were given just a few minutes today to get their rockets together and, unfortunately, it looks like that's going to make the majority of their adjustments at home, especially for our final launch day on Friday. I'll try to put up the assignment overview and data sheets on my DP later today, but I really have high hopes for this project and it's exciting to see how interested the students are already. I think we're going to have a lot of fun and learn a lot this week. Updates to follow -Mr. H

Rocket Mania

Greetings all, I'm back from my brief (very brief) trip up to Northern California this weekend. I flew up on Saturday morning with one of Southwest's 49 dollar fun fares and then drove back down with my girlfriend on Sunday afternoon. We took highway 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz which let us enjoy at least a small bit of the trip. As most of you have probably heard, we'll be kicking off Rocket Week tomorrow with an hour devoted to letting the students build their rockets in preparation of launches on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The fundamental concept behind Rocket Week is to expose the students to the Scientific Method, therefore it will be critical that the students take time after school and at home to make adjustments to their rocket after each launch. Hopefully, for some of you this will prove to be an opportunity to spend some fun crafty time with your student in an exciting pursuit. Next week we'll be devoting our math time to analyzing and representing the data the students collect from their launches this week, so make sure to inquire about their final conclusions and data representations after next week if you remember. Speaking of the math, in lieu of the recent schedule change for Free Market Friday from every fourth week to every sixth week, Colleen and I have had to adjust our mathematics curriculum schedule. The result is an additional quiz scheduled to take place two weeks after the first quiz and two weeks before each test. Although I dislike the idea of having a test only every sixth week instead of every four, I think the schedule can succeed for the students with the inclusion of a second quiz. Whether this second quiz will be the same as the first or more comprehensive we haven't discussed yet and I suppose we won't have an answer until we can get a better picture of where the students are at the time, but I think this new schedule will end up working out well for us. -Mr. H

Reflection for Music Video

Good Week All! Sorry I missed you yesterday, but at least I made it to the blog today, right? The big news around here is that we wrapped up the Music Video Project (at least most of us did) today, and are busy working on our reflections which are due on Friday. Reflections are a big part of our project curriculum here in the sixth grade as it helps not only us teachers design ever more engaging and effecitve projects for our subsequent students to undertake, but it also helps the students analyze their own learning and learning styles. For those of you more interested in learning about how your student learns how to learn (it makes sense, trust me) check out Wikipedia's entry on Metacognition here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
Ohterwise it is just school as normal around this place. Ms. Gavan is back in town which is great news for me and Mr. Talner in particular, but also for the whole sixth grade in general. We will also be having our second math test next week covering multiplication of decimals, powers of ten, and however much progress we make in dividing decimals next week (which might be none at all since Monday is a wash and we want to make sure we review adequately with the students). Oh, and we are having Rocket Week next week. Too bad it's a short week, but we should still get in at least three good launch days (maybe we'll start this Friday?) I'm not sure, but we will definitely need water bottles around this place, so if you've got any around in your house or car or wherever, send them on down and we'll be happy to shoot them through the troposphere. See you all soon, Free Market Friday on 10/21 -Mr. H