Tuesday 29 April 2008

good day

A few things have made for a good day. The newspaper activity I planned for today seemed to go well. I gave each pair of students a page from a newspaper (either The Independent or The Local Guardian, a free paper that's put through my letter box every fortnight). They had their first lesson about mean, median, mode, and range and so I asked them to list the lengths of 25 words. For example, the first five words in this paragraph have lengths 1, 3, 6, 4, 4. Then I asked them to find the averages and the range for their data.

Tomorrow we will talk about how a tally chart makes this process much more streamlined and easier. We'll learn about how to find the averages from the frequency table and compare the results from the two newspapers.

One unforeseen snag which I will certainly avoid next time was the somewhat adult content in the free paper. Oops!

After work I went to my kickboxing class. It was miserable out and Sarah and I were both feeling really unmotivated. But we went anyway and I'm so glad we did. I always find the press ups quite hard and today we had to do partner assisted elevated press ups! Sarah had to hold my knees against her thighs while she stood behind me with her knees bent. I was scared but in the end (amazingly!) managed to do twenty. I was only able to lower my upper body slightly each time, but still I consider this a success!

And I had a nice treat to look forward to when I got home. Ant ordered us Thai food and I really enjoyed half my prawn pad thai. I have saved the other half for lunch tomorrow. Yum.

1 comment:

Kevin, Sonya, Claire & Max said...

nice work with the exercises. I am hoping to starting running soon. I was suppose to start monday but I didn't because it was raining. And again rain today... maybe I will just suck it up and go. Teaching seems a lot like Prime Time.. coming up with interesting activities.