Welcome Back

I hope everyone had a wonderful and safe winter break. We are back at school and back to our studies.

8th grade L.A. Students finished presentations of their historic hero and have moved on to creating a graphic novel of them self as a hero in the future. They will start presenting those on Thursday. Students may need time at home to complete this assignment.

6th and 7th graders worked on their language skills and vocabulary today and will continue tomorrow learning through playing Jeopardy. No Homework.

Winter Break

Winter Break is already here!

Tuesday, January 6 will be our first day back after break. Have safe and wonderful holidays with your family.

Look for report cards in the mail.

December 9, 2008

Don't forget the levy meeting this evening at 6:30. Community members have been working hard to put together an informative meeting with hopes of communication from the community.

8th graders started a writer's workshop today on humor. Ask your child what causes humor in communication.
In Springboard we will be building our vocabulary tomorrow with an activity in degrees of meanings of words.

6th and 7th graders today worked on putting emotion into writing and built a wall of words to use. Tomorrow they will learn to change the emphasis on words to change the meaning of a sentence. All of these skills will be brought together in a monologue your child will prepare and present in class.

Also, next Thursday evening is the winter program and promises to be an evening of fun and holiday warmth. Plan to bring family and friends!

November 25, 2008

A reminder that Wednesday is an early release day. We will dismiss at 11:30. Have a great break!

8th Language Arts: We are studying the steps of a hero's journey. If your child is not in school on Wednesday, we will complete pages 48 - 50, as we continue to study the psychological aspects of a hero's journey, according to Joseph Campbell.

6/7th Language Arts: We continue to study the revision of a paper. We have studied adding, replacing and deleting. Wednesday we will practice deleting for revision in one of our own essays or writings.

For the week!

It is Wednesday and I will be gone the rest of the week to training. I will post for the week, so you know what is happening in Language Arts.

Wednesday: 8th Wrote their rough draft of a paper
6/7 practiced the three types of questions you can ask of a piece of text

Thursday: 8th will type their final draft of their paper
6/7 will work on understanding tone in written text

Friday: Both classes will study parts of speech that lead up to understanding verb tense, one of the most common writing problems in our middle-school classes

Tuesday, November 4

Change your school calendar! The winter program has been changed from December 19 to December 18.

Also, students received reminders today for picture retakes. Make up day is scheduled for November 5. The flyer will show packages available and some cool things such as: photo magnets, bookmarks, travel card, wanted poster and more!

6/7 Language Arts: We continued to go over the writing assessment which was returned yesterday. We worked on commas, semi-colons and conjuctions. No Homework.

8th Language Arts: We studied and made a class guide of how to use quotes and quoatation marks in writing. Students will soon be doing interviews for a paper and will need to use these in their writing. They completed a worksheet for practice, it is due tomorrow.

Reminder: Fall Conferences take place this Friday, November 7.

November 3

Nav. 101 Students completed their outline for student led conferences taking place this Friday.



6/7 Language Arts: Students reviewed their grades for this quarter, so they be able to explain their grades to parents. Students also reviewed the Embedded Assessment they recently completed. We covered common writing errors in our class and how to change those errors. We will continue to cover those common errors on Tuesday.



8th Language Arts: Students turned in their Form Poems, we reviewed the Back Map of learning to see if we are on target for preparing for the assessment at the end of this unit. Students are also continuing working in Literature Groups. We will work on Grammar Tuesday.