March 17, 2015

8th grade reading students will watch To Kill a Mockingbird Wednesday and Thursday of this week.  Please email me if you do NOT want your student to watch this movie.

Please continue to send in money for our Fallon Youth Club Student Council fundraiser.  This will continue until the end of the school year.

Next Friday we will have student led conferences in my classroom from 9:00-3:00.  You can come in anytime with your child and they will take you through what they have been doing in the class.  I will be available to answer any questions, and if you desire a meeting after you've met with your child I am happy to schedule that.

Projects:
Students will perform their water cycle/rock cycle raps tomorrow morning (Wednesday). They are doing a great job with this.  We will move into the Great Depression on Thursday and will work on building background so we can complete activities and projects.  Our study of World War 2 will come after that.

8th Grade Reading:
We finished To Kill a Mockingbird as a class today.  The students seemed to love the novel.  It is so full of information and lessons from that time period (Great Depression/Alabama). Our discussions have been valuable.  Now the students will work on completing their final essay. They have had this assignment since the day we started the novel, so they should be well prepared to write a full analysis of their take on the book's theme as it related to the setting, characters and plot. I look forward to reading them.

7th Grade Reading:
Students are back in the throws of their own silent reading and loving it. We are also practicing some Smarter Balanced test questions and working on poetry. It's important that students continue to read for at least 20 minutes every night. The biggest key to success in reading is to just do more and more of it.

Writing:
We are taking a break from formal writing assignments and studying how to evaluate and judge certain pieces of writing. We are taking a look at advertisements and examining the different propaganda techniques that are used in these ads. The students are engaged and having fun with it. They are also spending some time just free writing. We haven't done that in a few weeks and the kids always love a chance to express themselves on paper. They are encouraged to write about whatever they want.