What's Happening This Week:

Welcome Back! I hope you had a wonderful break!

Important Dates:

January 6th - First day of Second Semester

January 9th - 1st Semester Honor Roll and Character Key Awards Assembly @ 7:30a.m.

You will receive a separate message if your student is receiving an award. *As a reminder - At the Intermediate level, specials are not included in the GPA averaging for awards.*

January 9th - 1st Friday Hat Day - $2

January 13th - Watch Dogs Dads and Donuts

This week:

We will continue to work through Chapter 5 - Multiplying Decimals. We will work on the Chapter 5 Practice and Practice test. If all goes well, we will take the Chapter 5 test towards the end of the week.

Chapter 6 - Long Division comes next. My goal is to work in small groups with Mrs. Minne and Mrs. Herman to work on coordinate plane as well as volume. Concepts worked on in small group will *NOT* be homework, unless students cannot stay on task.

We will jump right into our next unit - Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. We read the play version so students will be able to act it out and have fun with it. The activities/assignments can be tricky so students may need additional help at home to help with understanding. At the end of the unit, we will watch the recorded version of the play that WC Drama performed a few years ago.

In addition to MSND, we will also begin reading Little Women as part of our Literature content. This book is quite long, so we will be reading it for many weeks. I plan to try to watch the movie at the end if we have time.

I am requesting that parents help their student with their reading and reading comprehension. They have been rushing trying to avoid homework and they are struggling to grasp content. It is imperative that they read the content multiple times prior to the unit assessment.

We will start off the semester with a science unit. We will be exploring Earth's systems. It is a fairly short unit.

Following Earth's systems we will explore Westward Expansion before the Civil War.

We are going to start the week with a dictionary relay game in groups. I will also introduce new lists this week with the tests for them beginning Tuesday next week.

New lists are current content based across subjects. Lists will only have 3 words. Students will be required to write each word with markings 4 times each, look up each word in the dictionary (writing down part of speech, page number and proper definition), and writing a sentence using each word correctly.

New lists will be posted to Parent Square.

Students will start writing a personal narrative about their Christmas Break. The narrative will be DUE next Friday, January 16th. This is a writing activity that CAN be worked on at home if more time is needed. Students will be allowed peer and adult conferencing as well.

Towards the end of the month, we will begin our next informational research essay based on Westward Expansion before the Civil War. *More info to come.*

January 6th - First day of Second Semester

January 9th - 1st Semester Honor Roll and Character Key Awards Assembly @ 7:30a.m.

January 9th - 1st Friday Hat Day - $2

January 13th - Watch Dogs Dads and Donuts

January 17th - 8th Grade BINGO Concessions