The Last of February

This week has been a productive one! Conferences were held Thursday evening, with the full day conference session next Wednesday; remember, no school for the kids! We also had our Hearts for Haiti celebration yesterday and today for winning the classroom contest portion of the activity. The South East Junior High show choir visited Lincoln today to perform their routine for the school!

I have posted new spelling and vocabulary words as we will still work on these next week with the no-school conference day. Weekly math will be coming home today and due next Friday, but there will be no current events because we will have T.F.K. next week.

The kids may also show you a "Best Buy Shopping" worksheet which is encouraged to be tried this weekend at home. In math we have been working with percents; finding the percent of a number, finding what percent of a number is another number, and so on. This worksheet is a way for the students to make the connection between math in school and math out of school. We see percentages all around us through shopping, money, and various other scenarios. I encourage you to ask your students about this worksheet and even add some of their own examples they may have seen over the weekend to the worksheet. The provided worksheet can be completed through imaginary items and prices, online things, or things they saw in-store.

In writing, we have just finished up our literary essays, which can be viewed in the hallway. We are also wrapping up our Chemical Interactions science kit, so feel free to ask your students what they have learned about kinetic energy, why the mirror in the bathroom fogs after a hot shower, or what the frost on your dry windows in the winter is called and how it gets there. 

The students have also finished reading their individual novels and are about half-way through their projects. I am expecting to finish these up by Friday and start having presentations throughout the week as they are completed.

In social studies we have been looking at the Constitution and its preamble, the Bill of Rights, and all of the work that goes into creating and amending these documents. I encourage you to have conversations with your student about things that are taking place in the world today that relate to rights and get them thinking about the "big picture" of our own everyday interactions. We have done several activities through these two units and will be completing a mock trial revolving around a government mandated curfew. Each student has been assigned a team role, and has been encouraged to think about how that person would react to this new ruling and debate it from that point of view (even if it isn't what they personally believe).

Thank you to those who I have already met for conferences and I look forward to seeing those of you who have conferences on Wednesday! I hope you all have a great weekend and get out to enjoy the weather as it is expected to be a bit warmer in the coming days!