Newsletter January 9th, 2015

Our 2^nd quarter CARE activity is coming up on Friday, January 30 and we have a lot of students who have missing or low summatives that might keep them from attending.  Individual teachers have emailed parents and spoken to individual students if they are currently ineligible to attend.  Because we have a 2 week window for make up work, students have been given deadlines by their respective teachers.  If your child remains ineligible to attend, he/she should be at school the day of the activity for an extended study hall.  We will have them work on work current for that time frame and/or go back and pick up previous work to ensure proficiency, as well as help them set up a plan for a more successful third quarter.

We are also looking at students who may be in need of additional help during summer school.  Any student who has not demonstrated proficiency in multiple standards in a particular class may be recommended for summer school in that class.  Letters will be coming home soon if your child may need this service.  You can check Infinite Campus looking for grades of 2 or lower as overall standards scores to know if your child may be in need to assistance.

Geography (Stoller):  Students did some exploration about India this week and learned a bit about it's culture and physical landscape.  Next Tuesday, they will have a guest speaker who will share about her experience as a study abroad student in India.  These visits usually create high interest.  Feel free to ask your student about what they learned!  Next week, students will work in groups to create a presentation about a particular world religion.  They will share these presentations the following week.  Students will need to use their class time wisely.  If they do so, they should only have 1-2 hours total of outside work time over the course of a week.

Tech Tools (Shumaker):  -Students are working on two different websites:  https://mapsengine.google.com and https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com.  They are creating a tour of places they have been or would like to go. For each place, they need a placeholder, a sentence or 2, and an image.  They will practice putting their citations in easybib.  Finally they will compare the 2 different website.  They might end up using those websites sometime in their geography class!  Just a reminder that all summatives need to be done to be able to go on the Care Field Trip.

Math (Stauss):  In math class this week, students reviewed how to write equations, rates and unit rates based upon a specific set of data. During the rest of the week we began reviewing for our unit test next week Tuesday.  Students were given a review in class that they were to complete by the end of this week.  On Friday, we went over every answer on that review.  Next week we will play Jeopardy on Monday for extra review.  On Tuesday, students will take their Comparing and Scaling unit test.  Towards the end of next week we will begin our Moving Straight Ahead unit which focuses on linear relationships.

English (Ripp):  We have been discussing the sign posts in reading to help us analyze text better, as well as getting back into the habit of starting each class with independent reading.  In class, we have discussed the expectation that students read outside of English class for at least 20 minutes and that if they do not, they will not be able to receive "3's" in some standards. 

We will be STAR testing this Monday and then continuing our exploration of reading.  A final reminder, that all projects and assingments are due to me by the 16th.  Late work cannot be accepted since I have to assess it before the quarter ends.