Mr. Holbrook’s Hillcrest Blog

Please follow this link to access Mister Holbrook’s Challenge Program Blog: Everything You Wanted To Know About The Hillcrest Challenge Program But Were Afraid To Ask. Thanks, – Mr. Holbrook

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I’m teaching the Challenge Program this year.  A new role at the school demands a new blog and here’s the link: Mister Holbrook’s Challenge Program Blog It’s very much under construction but, soon enough, you’ll see the same high level of blogging craftsmanship at my new site as you did at this one. – Mister [...]

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Today was listening station day in Humanities, a day for all students to bring in their iPods (or a CD) with songs related to the big ideas in Crispin: The Cross of Lead. At each listening station, students listened to music, reviewed the lyrics, and read an analysis of how the lyrics fit with the [...]

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The end is near for the Crispin novel study.  Today, you received the instruction sheet for the task, What’s On Crispin’s iPod. You can find a copy of the directions here: What\’s On Crispin\’s iPod Task Here’s what we did in class to work toward the completion of that task: 1. Lyrics People Search I asked the students [...]

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It seems that I had a bit of a brain cramp last week and forgot to update my blog.  Sorry about that.  It’s a bit late, but here’s what happened: 1. Songs in the Key of Crispin In preparation for our final task on the novel, I brought in 4 songs that relate to the [...]

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After the play at Dr. Charles Best Secondary and the fire / earthquake drill, there wasn’t a lot of time left for class work today but we did our best.  Here’s what we managed to wedge in: 1. Songs in the Key of Crispin I asked Ss to think of songs that might fit with [...]

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Today in both divisions we finally took up chapters 43 – 52 in Crispin: The Cross of Lead. Here’s how it looked: 1. Story Sorting To get in a Crispin frame of mind, I asked the students to put 9 events from the section into the order in which they actually happened. 2. Crispin’s Learnings [...]

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Today’s Humanities class (it was basically the same for Divs 17 and 19) had three parts: PART 1: City Life in the Middle Ages After thinking about our favourite cities (mmmm… Santa Barbara), we considered the sights, sounds and smells (yukkkkk… raw sewage) of Great Wexly, the walled city that Crispin and Bear visit.   Finally, [...]

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Today in Hum class both divisions did essentially the same stuff.  Here’s what shook down: A Dramatic Warm Up The lesson called for some acting so, to get warmed up, we played the following drama games: Boom… zap… bang! Hey, what are you doing? The Martha Game Tableaus Once the creative juices were flowing, each [...]

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Today was a day to showcase the creative talents of students in both Division 19 and Division 17. In blocks A and B, students in Div 19 finished off their 5 Dimensions of Health short films and presented them to the class in a gallery walk.  Many thanks to Learning Through the Arts educator Charlotte [...]

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