Last week, The Blue Jays traded away one of the team’s key players – centre fielder Vernon Wells. The trade took many fans by surprise because #10 was a fan favourite. In return for Wells, the Jays get catcher Mike Napoli and outfielder Juan Rivera.
Wells will now be playing for the Los Angeles Angels. The main reason for the trade was money. Wells had one of the highest salaries of any baseball player. In fact, when they traded him, the Jays still owed him $86-million (over the next four years).
Although Wells was once an All-Star and won three Golden Glove awards (given to great defensive players), lately he has struggled with injuries and poor batting.
The Angels will pay Wells $23-million this year, and a little less than that for each of the next three years.
Now that Wells’s financial burden has been lifted from the Blue Jays, they will have some money to bargain for other players they can sign.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
Writing/Discussion Prompt
Vernon Wells is a very famous baseball player, but he’s also a person just like you. How do you think you would feel if you were an athlete and were traded to a new team? If you were Vernon Wells and talking to reporters what types of things would you say?
Reading Prompt
Readers use many different strategies when they read a new word. One of the very best strategies is to look for words they know inside the new one. For example, if a reader knows the words “bar” and “gain” then reading the word, “bargain” becomes a lot easier. Try it out yourself and see how knowing the smaller, “inside” word helps you read the bigger word. On a piece of paper, write 10 words from today’s article that have smaller words inside them.
Primary and Junior
Predict the meaning of and rapidly solve unfamiliar words using different types of cues, including: graphophonic (phonological and graphic) cues (e.g. onset and rime; syllables; similarities between words with common spelling patterns and unknown words; words within words) (OME, Reading: 3.2).
Grammar Feature: Parentheses
Parentheses are used by writers to make what they are trying to say clearer, to say something extra (an afterthought), or to add their own personal comment.
Copy the sentence below 3 times. Each time add a comment in parentheses. The first time, use the parenthesis to clarify the sentence. The second time, use the parentheses to add an extra thought. The third time, use the parentheses to add your personal comment.
Tonight I had pizza for dinner ( __________________________ ).
