Almost there

I have four days of school left until my first Christmas break that will be spent NOT working retail!! Yippee!!!!!!  I get to spend it hanging out with my family and friends and catching up with everybody. Here is what my week looks like until I arrive home on Saturday. Tomorrow morning (Tuesday), I have a staff meeting, fairly normal school morning, then play practice in the afternoon and the kids have to wrap their presents for their parents. Wednesday comes and the morning will be as normal as it can be with the dress rehersal for the Christmas program. Some of the students from the town school are coming to watch the rehersal and I guess this is a BIG deal for both sets of students. They are so excited! Then comes Thursday.....the big day. This is the official Christmas program where members from the community (aka:the town of Ryegate) can come out to the colony and watch the kids perform. After all the busy work of doing the Christmas program on Thursday, Friday will come. Friday is the day that theyy get to undo everything that they have been working on for the past three weeks! All the decorations, play props and lights will come down. the costrumes will be reorganized and put into their totes for next year. After all the posters come down off my walls for the break the girls will scrub the school from  floor to ceiling, literally.
Today I made my lesson plans for the first week in January. I get to start off my first week back from break with a four day school week.  Thursday, January sixth is a holiday on the colony. I am not really sure why it is a holiday. The kids tried to explain it to me at the beginning of the school but I don't remember what it is. I think it is an extra day to celebrate Jesus.  Yay for Jesus, right?!!  I will be able to spend that day working in my classroom and maybe even going into the town school and doing some observations.  I need to get into some math classes because some of the 8th grade algebra is the math that hauted me in middle school, high school and college and now it is coming back to haunt me again! I just can't get away from math!!!! AAHHHHHHHH....at least we are doing awesome things right now like circumference, perimeter, slope and ratios. At least I know how to do these things without having to sit down and do the entire set of practice problems before teaching the lesson.  Today, however puzzled me because I was teaching circumference to my sixth graders and one of the kept saying "but I don't know." so, I kept asking a series of questions to figure out what part of finding the circumference of a circle she was confused on. They kept answering, "yes, I know," and "uh-huh," but somehow they still did not understand. We even practiced finding the radius and diameter together and putting the numbers into the formula. "What do you multiply?" was the most common question. "Why are their two formulas? Why is 3.14 that way?"  These are the kinds of thoughts that go through my students' heads when I am teaching. I am still not sure they got it though, the symbol of pi seemed to be what royally confused them. They have such a hard time accepting symbols as a part of math.  They think it is odd that they are supposed to use a symbol instead of writing a number out. Perhapse a different approach tomorrow will shed some light onto the situation. Signing off for now! Stay dry Washington!!!