Week of November 27th

Bonjour!

I mainly update this blog to post the new audio dictée, but it also allows me to reflect on the past week and what is to come.  Perhaps if I only posted the dictée the post would get out sooner, but I wouldn't get to share the fun things like how fun it was to make bread this past Wednesday!

Making bread in a classroom with 7 & 8 year olds is a whole-day adventure.  In the past I would help each student to measure ingredients.  In an effort to streamline the process, and to save my sanity, this year I decided to pre-measure ingredients for each group.  With the pre-measured ingredients, the dough had extra time to rise since all groups were able to mix the components at the same time.

My goal was to tie-in this baking with our Matter unit, so I tried to point out how the yeast was activated with the warm water and how mixing the ingredients together produced gasses.  The proof were the bubbles in the dough.

Mixing ingredients was a cinch.  An hour or so later, shaping the dough quickly became very exciting.  At some point someone had the idea to add more flour and soon many students were running to the front of the class while stretching gooey dough between their hands.  I wish I could have shared the laughs by texting a picture to my night custodian!  Everything turned out fine and it really wasn't all that messy after all.  I still have to perfect this part of the process though so next time,  giving each group a small bowl of extra flour and having more cookie sheets would make it this step easier.

Bread dough is very forgiving and it turned out well in the end.  We ate the buns around 2pm, hot out of the oven.  Many thanks to all of you who sent in flour, butter, and jam.  Every year someone says:  "This is the best bread in the world!".  I love hearing this and it makes it all worth while.  Next time we will have to make a few extra buns for hungry staff who turn up at our door.

On Thursday we wrote-up our "experiment" in our Science duotangs.  If you would like to try this at home, the recipe is here.  Our dough was a bit too runny so you may need to add more flour.

Friday and Saturday I was sponsored by the District to attend the Google Summit for educators at Oak Bay High School.  It was a s 2 day conference packed with all the latest and greatest ideas using Google Apps for Education.  I'm really grateful to have been one of the teachers chosen to attend this conference.  Oh, and someone in my household may or may not have welcomed a new 360camera into our life.

This week's audio dictée: