LANGUAGE

Students started reading the first chapter and they are asked to note teh questions that crop up in their minds as they read the chapter.

August 14,2013,Wednesday.

Students were introduced to the figurative language  and they identified the figurative language .

August 16,2013

Students learned about the significance of TITLE in an article.They later chose an article in a magazine and analysed the title and use of different parts of speech and forms  for interesting titles.

August 19,2013

Students  exchanged  and checked the graphic organizers about the article and started writing the article.

August 21,2013
Students corrected each others essay writing using the editing symbols.

August 23,2013
Students learned about the format of report writing and wrote the report on guest speaker,Ms.Kamini Menon.

You can use this link to read more books online:http://www.wegivebooks.org/books

August 26,2013

  Students completed a writing piece on the special day of their life and the significance of this day.
September 5,2013

Students read The Novel The borrowers and started Literature circle to discuss and improve their communication skills and deepen their understanding .

Students started connectives,worksheets for practice is emailed to the students,

September 5,2013

Students worked in groups with literature circle sheets to discuss their task on chapter number one of The Borrowers.Students also started to work on the chapter two with a different role sheet.

October1,2013:

Socratic seminar:

When bullying goes high-tech

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

April 15, 2013 -- Updated 1812 GMT (0212 HKT)

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

HIDE CAPTION

How teens experience social networks<

HIGHLIGHTS

·         As many as 25% of teenagers have experienced cyber-bullying

·         Among young people, it's rare that an online bully will be a total stranger

·         Researchers are working on apps and algorithms to detect and report bullying online

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(CNN) -- Brandon Turley didn't have friends in sixth grade. He would often eat alone at lunch, having recently switched to his school without knowing anyone. While browsing MySpace one day, he saw that someone from school had posted a bulletin -- a message to many people that everyone could see -- saying that Turley was a jerk.  Students he had never even spoken with wrote on it, too, saying they agreed. Feeling confused and upset, Turley wrote in the comments asking why his classmates would say that.

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The response was even worse: He was told on MySpace that a group of 12 kids wanted to beat him up, that he should stop going to school and die. On his walk from his locker to the school office to report what was happening, students yelled things like "baby" and "fatty." "It was just crazy, and such a shock to my self-esteem that people didn't like me without even knowing me," said Turley, now 18 and a senior in high school in Oregon. "I didn't understand how that could be."

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A major problem

As many as 25% of teenagers have experienced cyber-bullying at some point, said Justin W. Patchin, who studies the phenomenon at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He and his colleagues have conducted formal surveys of 15,000 middle and high school students throughout the United States, and found that about 10% of teens have been victims of cyber-bullying in the last 30 days.

Online bullying has a lot in common with bullying in school: Both behaviors include harassment, humiliation, teasing and aggression. Cyber-bullying presents unique challenges in the sense that the bully can attempt to be anonymous, and attacks can happen at any time of day or night.

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Brandon Turley, 18, who experienced cyber-bullying in middle school, designed the WeStopHate.org website.

However, there's still more bullying that happens at school than online, Patchin said. Also, among young people, it's rare that an online bully will be a total stranger. "In our research, about 85% of the time, the victim knows who the bully is, and it's usually somebody from their social circle," Patchin said. Patchin's research has also found that, while cyber-bullying is in some sense easier to see, the kids who bully online also tend to bully at school. "Technology isn't necessarily creating a whole new class of bullies," he said.

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Long-lasting consequences

The conversations that need to be happening around cyber-bullying extend beyond schools, said Thomas J. Holt, associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University.

"How do we extend or find a way to develop policies that have a true impact on the way that kids are communicating with one another, because students could be bullied at home from 4 p.m. until the next morning. What kind of impact is that going to have on the child in terms of their development and mental health?" he said.

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Mr. Holt recently published a study in the International Criminal Justice Review using data collected in Singapore by his colleague Esther Ng. The researchers found that 27% of students who experienced bullying online, and 28% who were victims of bullying by phone text messaging, thought about skipping school or skipped it. That's compared to 22% of students who experienced physical bullying. Those who said they were cyber-bullied were also most likely to say they had considered suicide -- 28%, compared to 22% who were physically bullied and 26% who received bullying text messages.

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Although there may be cultural differences between students in Singapore and the United States, the data on the subject of bullying seems to be similar between the two countries, Holt said. A recent study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry suggests that both victims and the bullies can feel long-lasting psychological effects. Bullying victims showed greater likelihood of agoraphobia, where people don't feel safe in public places, along with anxiety and panic or fear.

Tips for parents

1. Be a good example -- kids often learn bullying behavior from their parents.

2. Teach your child what it means to be a good friend.

3. Make your home a safe haven for kids after school.

4. Use teachable moments on TV to show the power of bystanders.

5. Listen. Don't be in denial about incidents that are brought to your attention.

People who were both victims and bullies were at higher risk for young adult depression, panic disorder, agoraphobia among females, and the likelihood of suicide among males.

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Reporting cyber-bullying

Since everything we do online has a digital footprint, it is possible to trace anonymous sources of bullying on the Internet, Patchin said. Patchin explained the easy evidence of seeing and tracking cyber-bullying may be clearer than "your word against mine" situations of traditional bullying. Patchin advises that kids who are being cyber-bullied keep the evidence, whether it's an e-mail or Facebook post, so that they can show it to adults they trust. Historically, there have been some issues with schools not disciplining if bullying didn't strictly happen at school, but today, most educators realize that they have the responsibility and authority to intervene, Patchin said.

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Adults can experience cyber-bullying also, although there's less of a structure in place to stop it. Their action for solution is basically to hire a lawyer and proceed through the courts, Patchin said. Even in school, though, solutions are not always clear. Turley's mother called the school on his behalf, but the students involved were onl                                                                                                                               y scolded as punishment. Cyber-bullying wasn't considered school-related behavior, at least at that time, he said. "I was just so afraid of people," says Turley, explaining why he went to different middle schools each year in sixth, seventh and eighth grade. He stayed quiet through most of it, barely speaking to other students.

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Fighting back by speaking out

Turley started slowly merging back into "peopleness" in eighth grade when he started putting video diaries on YouTube. Soon, other students were asking him to help them film school project videos, track meets and other video projects. In high school, Turley discovered an organization called WeStopHate.org, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping people who have been bullied and allow them a safe space to share their stories. Emily-Anne Rigal, the founder of the organization, experienced bullying in elementary school, getting picked on for her weight. Although she and Turley lived on opposite sides of the country, they became friends online, united by their passion for stopping bullying.

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WeStopHate.org has achieved reaching many people. Rigal has received all sorts of honors for her efforts, from the Presidential Volunteer Service Award to a TeenNick HALO Award presented by Lady Gaga. Turley designed the WeStopHate.org website and most of its graphics, and is actively involved in the organization. In additional to Rigal, he has many other friends in different states whom he's met over the Internet. "I got cyberbullied, and I feel like, with that, it made me think, like, well, there has to be somebody on the Internet who doesn't hate me," he said. "That kind of just made me search more."

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Parental controls

Ashley Berry, 13, has also experienced unpleasantness with peers online. When she was 11, a classmate of hers took photos of Ashley and created an entire Facebook page about her, but denied doing it when Ashley confronted the student whom she suspected. "It had things like where I went to school, and where my family was from and my birthday, and there were no security settings at all, so it was pretty scary," she said.

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The page itself didn't do any harm or say mean things, Ashley said. But her mother, Anna Berry, was concerned about the lack of privacy, and then wondered what else was happening to her daughter in school: Friends were uninviting her to birthday parties and leaving her to eat alone at the lunch table. "You would see a girl who should be on top of the world coming home and just closing herself into her bedroom," Berry said. Berry had to get police involved to have the Facebook page taken down. For seventh grade, her current year, Ashley entered a different middle school instead of the school she should have gone to for classes. She says she's a lot happier now, and does media interviews speaking out against bullying.

A classmate of Ashley Berry took photos of her and created an entire fake Facebook page.

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These days, Mrs. Berry has strict rules for her daughter's online behavior. She knows Ashley's passwords, and she's connected with her daughter on every social network that the teen has joined (except Instagram, but Ashley has an aunt watching her there). Ashley won't accept "friend" requests from anyone she doesn't know.

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Technical solutions to technical problems

Parents, extended relatives, Internet service providers and technology providers can all be incorporated in thinking about how children use technology, Holt said. Apps that control how much time children spend online, and other easy-to-use parental control devices, may help, Holt said. There could also be apps to help parents to better protect their children from certain content and help them report bullying. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on an even more automated solution. They want to set up a system that would give bullying victims coping strategies, encourage potential bullies to stop and think before posting something offensive, and allow people who see bullying happen to practice being confident to defend victims, said Henry Lieberman.

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Lieberman's students, Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar, are working on an algorithm that would automatically detect bullying language. The research group has broken down the sorts of offensive statements that commonly get made, grouping them into categories such as racial/ethnic slurs, intelligence insults, sexuality accusations and social acceptance/rejection. While it's not all of the potential bullying statements that could be made online, MIT Media Lab scientists have a knowledge base of about 1 million statements. They've thought about how some sentences, such as "you look great in lipstick and a dress," can become offensive if delivered to males specifically.

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The idea is that if someone tries to post an offensive statement, the potential bully would receive a message such as "Are you sure you want to send this?" and some educational material about bullying may pop up. Lieberman does not want to automatically ban people, however.

"If they reflect on their behavior, and they read about the experience of others, many kids will talk themselves out of it," he said.

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Lieberman and colleagues are using their machine learning techniques on the MTV-partnered website "A Thin Line," where anyone can write in their stories of cyber-bullying, read about different forms of online disrespect, and find resources for getting help. The researchers' algorithm tries to detect the theme or topic of each story, and match it to other similar stories.

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Turley and Rigal, who is now a freshman at Columbia University, are currently promoting the idea of having a "bully button" on Facebook so that people can formally report cyber-bullying to the social network and have bullies suspended for a given period of time. They haven't gotten a response yet, but they're hopeful that it will be accepted. In the meantime, Turley is feeling a lot safer in school than he used to. "Times have changed definitely, where people are becoming slowly more aware," he said. "At my school, at least, I'm seeing a lot less bullying and more acceptance overall. People just stick to their own friends."