Mr. Miller's Classroom Blog

Posts under ‘Classroom Activities’

World Education Games

Feb 11th, 2012
by John Miller.
2 comments

The Treasure Seekers are signed up for the World Education Games and have been practicing like crazy. We’ve enrolled ourselves into all three challenges: spelling, math, and science. If you are not familiar with the challenge, students compete with other kids around the world and within their age group to see how many questions they can get correct. There are five levels with 10, one-minute competitions at each level. Teachers can track class and individual progress. The Spelling Games take place first, on March 6th, followed by math on March 7th, and science on March 8th. Once students are signed-up, they can “practice” all they want to online. ;-)

Quadblog post #2 – Questions for you!

Jan 23rd, 2012
by John Miller.
6 comments

For our second activity, several students created a survey that we would like you to take. We plan on sharing the results as soon as everyone has had a chance to answer the questions. You don’t need to answer all of the questions. Just the ones you want too :-)
 

 

Netbooks arrived!

Jan 20th, 2012
by John Miller.
3 comments

It’s been more than a year since room 162 was vandalized and eighteen computers were stolen. Today, we received our replacements. Thirty-two new netbooks arrived and I had the pleasure of distributing them to my students this morning as they walked in the room. We are not ready to have the netbooks go home yet, but each student will be using them throughout the day and we will charge them overnight.

The new Acers are running ubermix and I’ve customized each a bit. As we are a Google Apps school, the default browser is Chrome. Several extensions have been added including the Google URL shortener, Diigo app for our class bookmarks, an RSS reader so that students can easily track their favorite blogs, and one of my favorite extensions, Readabilty to remove excessive formatting from webpages.

I decided to test my assigned network capacity immediately. I wanted to see how my one Airport Base Station would handle 32 simultaneous connections. As with most Apple products, the connection was easy and seamless. “All right kids, let’s try to break it.” They fired up their Google Apps accounts and began sending emails, creating presentations, forms, and shared documents, watched Animoto videos, logged into their blogs, and opened multiple tabs in Chrome. I even had a video Skype call with a student across the room. None of us noticed any slowdown. The network and the netbooks performed brilliantly. Next week I get to return to my “regular” lessons that include plenty of netbook time.

It was a good day.

Quad blogging begins January 16th

Jan 2nd, 2012
by John Miller.
3 comments

We will kick off the new year by “Quad Blogging” with three classes located around the world. In a quad blog, four classes collaborate to promote writing and interactions between students and teachers. The process runs for four weeks with each class gaining the spotlight for one week. When it is our turn, we post activities and information on this blog for the other three classes to interact with.

Quad blogging is great fun because we get to meet new people around the world. This year, we will be blogging with The Fabulous 6D’s in the UK, Room 12′s Awesome Learners in New Zealand, and ZER Vent Serè in Spain.

Winter Wonderland Dance

Dec 10th, 2011
by John Miller.
1 comment

As we finish up our last week before we take our Christmas holiday break, we always have a school dance. We thought we would share with our friends a few images from the evening.

 

Catching up on visits

Nov 4th, 2011
by John Miller.
3 comments

We finally had some time today to check out our friend’s blogs around the world and look at our own student blogs with eyes on improving them over the coming holidays. Some of our favorite posts were by Mr. Lane’s class who had fun creating some mini-monsters for Halloween. We also read about how Msrs. Yollis and class promote Family Blogging Month. Finally, we enjoyed learning about exponents from Mr. Avery’s class. Their movies are fantastic!

I’m very proud of my students and their progress this year. We are using their blogs for both personal writing, the Edublog Challenge, and for writing assignments. Even though they are new to blogging, most have 15 or more posts already. You can visit them by checking out the Treasure Seeker Links to the right.  Some terrific posts have been recently added by Edith(Favorite website), Paloma(Bullying), Cassidy (World Wildlife Federation), Clay (Fun websites), Isaiah (Global warming),  Letty (Pyramids), and Christian (Illegal whaling).

Image: ‘From Darkness to Light – please read’

flickr.com/photos/41864721@N00/2884635654

A tough loss for the U.S. team

Sep 11th, 2011
by John Miller.
21 comments

The U.S. National Rugby team suffered a hard fought loss to Ireland yesterday. The defense was able to hold the Irish team back for awhile, but consistent pressure eventually led to a 22-10 defeat for the U.S. team.

We need some help translating the game highlights from the Rugby News Service. Can someone tell us what a “ruck” is in the following quote:

The USA’s resistance was led by Todd Clever. The openside flanker was everywhere – slowing down Irish ruck ball, supporting ball carriers and piling up bodies on the side of the ruck like a man who knew he had to lead by example.

We are not sure what it means, but we have a few ideas. We would also like some perspective from anyone that was able to watch the match. It did not come on the television until almost midnight here so we only have the highlights to go on. The next match for the U.S. team is on September 15th against Russia.

Rugby!

Sep 8th, 2011
by John Miller.
7 comments

Most students at Chalone Peaks Middle School have never heard of the sport called rugby. In the next few weeks the Treasure Seekers will be learning about the game and following the Rugby World Cup going on in New Zealand. Many nations are participating in the competition and several class bogs will be supporting their home team throughout the tournament.

We hope to learn a great deal about rugby by studying it, but also hope our friends around the world can give us some tips about the sport. It is very popular in countries like New Zealand, Australia, England, Scotland, Canada, and France. The United States has a team too, so we will be supporting The Eagles as they try to advance out of the first round.

What is your favorite team? Who do you think will win it all?

Tour of California

May 24th, 2011
by John Miller.
9 comments

Picture 1

Last week was a busy one for Room 162 students and Mr. Miller. The Amgen Tour of California bike race sailed right by our school on Thursday, May 19th. We packed a lunch and walked out to catch the riders on their way from Seaside to Paso Robles. King City was the halfway point of the 135 mile fifth stage.

IMG_0816-1We prepared for their arrival by making posters, learning about the riders and the teams from the Amgen site, and by purchasing flags that represented the home countries of numerous riders.

We discovered that many of the riders were from places we already knew about because of our partner schools this year. For example, Team Saxo Bank and Team Rabobank had several riders from Denmark (Go Vonsild School!) We also cheered for riders from New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, and of course, the United States.

IMG_0824

(All photos courtesy Ms. Agius)

Team Radio Shack had the top two finishers and Team Garmin had the best overall finish. We were very excited to see Oscar Freire from Team Rabobank take the lead on his own right in front of us. He held on for the next 5o miles, but gave it up in the end to the peleton and eventual stage winner Peter Sagan of  Team Liquigas.

← Earlier Posts