Whoa! Two weeks and no update?
Last Saturday, two of my students participated in the Okayama Preliminary for the Prince Takamado Trophy All Japan Inter-Middle School English Oratorical Contest. I'm happy to say that one of my third grade students got third place and one of my second grade students got first. Two students who aren't in my class but who I helped to coach also won prizes in the recitation contest. They all worked very, very hard and I'm really proud of all of them!
This week, the first grade students read an article about fashions, focusing particularly on 17th and 18th century fashions. On Tuesday, they made presentations about unusual fashions. The excerpt was from the excellent textbook "Grammar Sense" by Oxford.
The second grade students read an excerpt from the excellent book "The Blue and the Gray" by Henry Steele Commager. The article was called "The Blue and The Gray Fraternize on the Picket Line" and was written by Alexander Hunter. It describes an incident during the US Civil War in which enemy troops peacefully traded tobacco for sugar and coffee. We then had a discussion about war and peace, and how the US Civil War changed the way wars are fought.
The third grade students read an article I wrote about the Mausoleum of Theodoric. This building was built nearly 1500 years ago, and it's puzzle-like interlocking pieces are held together by the 300 ton dome that acts as the keystone to the structure. Magnificent engineering, and quite a puzzle how they got that dome all the way from Croatia to Ravenna, Italy.
The third grade students made presentations about unusual buildings, including the Washington Monument, Sydney Opera House and the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima.
Next week, the first grade students will read an article about Social Anxiety Disorder, the second graders will read an article about rising food prices and increasing poverty, and the third graders will read an article about a father who smashed his daughter's cell phone with a hammer because she ran up a $4,000 dollar phone bill in a single month by sending over 10,000 text messages.
The first graders finished their special project on their prequel book for The Cave, and luckily finished it on Parents' Day so that some of the visiting parents got to see the powerpoint presentation they did.
Our next project will be a video documentary about Seishin. The students will each narrate one section that will talk about an unusual place in the school, and as we go from place to place, the students will introduce the school.
Later I will upload the most recent photos, which include suggestions that my high school first grade class made for giving me a makeover!
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Date: 2009⁄10⁄02 20:32｜Permalink｜Author：nelp
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