First days

The first few days of school have come and gone.  Holy cow! At this point, we have worked on a lot of small and, seemingly, random things: joined our MBC group, parallelism, characterization, Blogger, and "le Morte d'Arthur".  Don't give up yet.  Don't get discouraged.  We have a little more disconnectedness to get through (Achieve 3000) and then (hopefully) things will start to flow a little more.

One of the activities we began the year with is the spaghetti challenge.  The goal is to create a tower that will hold a single marshmallow.  You only get 20 (dry) spaghetti noodles, a yard of string, and a yard of tape to make the tallest freestanding tower.

This was a silly activity that had very little to do with our English/Language Arts standards.  However, through this activity, students had to effectively communicate, problem solve, work as a team, deal with the pressures of being in a time crunch, and deal with the pressures of the other teams' towers.  In the end, there were some successes--only a few towers stood; however, we had almost 100% participation.