Happy New Year!!

Welcome to Week 1 of the 2nd semester (and 3rd quarter)!

This week we kick off our formal study of CRITICAL THINKING.  We will continue this study throughout the remaining 18 weeks of this school year.

Monday: NO SCHOOL

Tuesday: Today I asked the kids to remove all of their bell ringer responses and 7 Habits work from the 1st semester (1st and 2nd quarters) from their notebooks to make room for the remaining 18 weeks of bell ringers and critical thinking activities.  As well, they will be required to use a red pen this year for their bell ringer work, so they must bring a red pen each day (along with at least 2 sharpened pencils) to class in order to be fully prepared.  For their bell ringer activities, the students are working on improving their grammar.  They will view some writing that has many grammar errors and writing down the information in grammatically correct format.

Today's lesson included a discussion and visual presentation of Bloom's Taxonomy (see below).  The students learned about Benjamin Bloom's classification of the 6 levels of critical thinking.  We discussed each level in class, added a short definition for each level, and we began work on an acronym to help the students memorize each level. 
Tuesday's Homework:  Review their class notes (homework for EVERY DAY) and to memorize the order of Bloom's taxonomy.

Wednesday:  The students took a quiz on the 6 levels of Bloom's Taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking.
After the quiz, we began to take a close look at why critical thinking is so important, what is necessary to become a critical thinker, and what are some of the major obstacles that get in the way of critical thinking.  To answer these questions, the students were given a series of handouts to read, annotate, and discuss in class.  These activities will take place throughout the remainder of this week.

Wednesday's homework:  Finish reading, annotating and answering the questions in section 1.1.

Thursday: With my guidance, the students created an outline of sections 1.1 - 1.2 of their reading today. They learned the essential components of an outline, and used the information they had annotated in their reading to fill in their outline.  Their homework for tonight (Thursday) is to finish reading section 1.3 and then add to their outline by including the annotated information from their reading of section 1.3 of their handout.

Friday:  The students received another handout entitled: 1.4 Obstacles to Critical Thinking.  Together, we started the process of continuing our outline to include information from this handout.  Homework for Friday: Finish reading and annotating the 1.4 handout and then finish up the outline to include section IV. (Section IV of the outline should include the letters A - E and 1. and 2. for each capital letter).

This week's Bell Ringers: (Correct the grammar errors)

Monday: No School

Tuesday: dear sir or madam
                please send me the following coins two canadian dollars one five-dollar gold piece and
                three booker t washington half dollars
                sincerely
                p rossicone

Wednesday: a.  us boys havent never tore the kite into to pieces
                      b.  that garden in my opinion has the brighter flowers in charleston

Thursday:  a. wont you pass there popcorn over to kim and i
                    b. we have knew for some time that prof imende teaches history real good

Friday: a.  yesterday i laid down in the hammock and read treasure island a novel by robert
                   louis stevenson
              b.  their was to little rain this summer for the Grass to grow much more tall