March Break - Happy St. Patrick's Day

Today we are meeting to go over the units for primary and intermediate we have created/adapted from the junior unit.

The two weeks after March Break will be an intensive implementation of our units to iron out the kinks and work out the bugs.  Then the units will be put into Blurb and sent for publishing.

Nate has worked on adapting some of our outline and research into a parent pamphlet.

We need to come up with colour and design elements to go along with these units before we head to printing.  This may be the trickiest part of all!

Our next meeting will be Friday, April 1st to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the units.  We do not expect to have completed them (2 four day weeks in a row thanks to Easter).  But if we can get to the lessons just before the culminating, we should have a good idea of what works and what doesn't.

What to do next...

So we are now moving to the adaptation phase. 

Our next meeting will be Thursday, March 17th (Happy St. Paddy's Day!) at 9:00 chez Nate.  We will each have adapted the unit to our division level.  This meeting will be an opportunity for us to share the differentiation of the activities and share our thinking.

Nate is going to continue working on the parent pamphlet.  I will clean up the bibliographies.

This will put us into the position to begin teaching these units in our classes after March Break.  YEAH!  High fives!

Friday, March 4th - Editing and Finalizing the Junior Unit

How is it possible that it is March 4th?  Time has flown.  The view outside also belies the date.  After a mild and snowless winter we now have this?

We have finally reached the stage where the document is more or less complete.  There is still a lot of tweaking in terms of cleaning up language and harmonizing formatting, but we are reaching the point where the Junior Unit will be done and we can adapt the Intermediate and Primary Units.

It is starting to feel doable.  A preliminary print out of the unit makes it look somewhat professional and like we may actually know what we are doing.

We have also decided to change our parent outreach to a simple pamphlet.  We have an idea of what it will look like, but we still don't have anything on paper.