Mr. Mansour’s Classroom Blog

It’s not a major update, but MrMansour.com got an overhaul today. I’ve added some rss feeds and changed some colors. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be updating the subpages on my blog.

Mr Mansour’s Classroom via kwout

In this study session, you will complete two tasks.  Both of these tasks will help you review topics covered during this unit.  Listen carefully.  Most of these things you should already have in your notes, but if you would like to write some things down you may.

1. Your first task is about the layers of the earth.  Click on the link at the end of this sentence to watch the earth’s layers sketchcast.

2.  Your second task is about the rock cycle. Click on the link at the end of this sentence to watch the rock cycle sketchcast.

The 4th grade teacher at JMSO (Ms. Bolin) uses this “Reading Units” site for daily comprehension quizzes with several of the books her class reads.  While some of the links on a few of the books don’t work correctly, most work very well and have good questions.

We only had a day and a half of class last week, but this week is so chock full of activity that it’s making up for the lost days.  In the 6th grade, we’re filming Lost in Time 4 (this may be the quickest an LIT production has ever been filmed) and  we’ll be continuing our geology unit on Wednesday.  I’ve started a mini-psychology unit with the 8th graders last week and today I introduced classical conditioning.  There is a great site we used today with a game where you can condition Pavlov’s dog.  In the 7th grade, we started a new unit on the Animal Kingdom and and we’re studying Japan, the Koreas, and China in Geography.

We had a very short week this week, so there wasn’t too much going on. The highlight of the week is probably the 7th grade science test on DNA and evolution.  We also looked at the ethical side of science and the moral choices scientists sometimes face.  Two weeks ago, we also had Chip Maxwell from the Nebraska Council for Ethical Research come to our class and talk about stem cell research and the ethical dilemmas surrounding it.My 8th grade Algebra students have been learning some basic programming skills using Microsoft Access and they’ve been building a small database of things they’d like to sell and crunching the numbers on them.  While we were in the lab, Miss Bolin’s students came to complete an online reading quiz.  The site is very cool.  I’ll get it from her and post it next week.

Unfortunately, the first page I posted for the podcasts doesn’t work right.  I spent much of last night trying to fix it, but to no avail.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to fix it soon.  In the meantime, I’ve re-encoded the podcasts as mp3s and attached them to a new page that actually works.

Check out the podcasts here.

The 8th graders have finally completed their podcasts.  It took much longer than I anticipated, but we got them finished.  Each group wrote, recorded, and edited the material in the podcasts.  Each episode covers a topic we studied in our unit on sound. Click here to check them out. 

The 6th grade went to St. Margaret Mary today to present their Green Monkey Project. They got to present to the two third grade classes and did a great job. This is the 5th school they have presented to in the last two years. We hope to start visiting businesses soon.  Check out our site at GreenMonkeySchools.com.

I made this survey on a site called fo.reca.st. It allows you to create custom surveys for free and post them to your blog. Please participate in the one below.  I’m having some trouble getting it to show up in the blog right now, so just go to this link.

Click here to take survey.

We’ve been using the freeware program Audacity a lot during our sound unit to test different frequencies and the limits of human hearing. (The students certainly have a higher range than me, but I’m not too far behind). It works on PCs and Macs.

Another great site that has some cool samples of different sound frequencies is Ergonomics 4 Schools.