Weekly Memo

Sorry I'm coming to you midweek with this, but it has been a very busy week, and it's only half over. This week officially began the final 9 weeks of the year. Last week, students received their report cards. Hopefully it was good news. If not, students have one more 9 weeks to pull grades up before the end of the year.

Today, all classes will be visiting the Media Center for book check-out. This book check-out will be for their final Book Report Project, and the requirement is to read something like they haven't read all year. Something out of their comfort zone, so to speak. After going to the library, they will receive their paperwork that discusses the project. This paper must be signed and returned by Friday. On Monday, all students that have brought back their signed project paper will receive more detailed instructions on their project.

On Thursday, I will not be in class due to a meeting that will take place all day. A member of the Traveling team of subs will be in class instead. Due to this, I will be switching my Thursday and Friday lesson plans, so Thursday will turn into "Throwback" Thursday, where students will be working in their groups out of the Literature Coach Books to help review areas they have struggled with heading into the CRCT, which is in less than two weeks time.

In my Literature classes (1st and 6th Period), we worked on a culminating group project on "The Smallest Dragonboy" by Anne McCaffrey, which we finished reading last week. This project was completed on Monday and Tuesday and will count as two project grades. On Friday, we will have our test over "The Smallest Dragonboy." It will be completed using a Scantron (bubble sheet), so all students will need to remember to bring a pencil to class in order to complete the test.

In my Read 180 classes (2nd and 3rd), we started a new workshop, Workshop 4: Stolen Childhoods, which goes into depth about childhood labor in different parts of the world. It is a very serious subject, and so far, the students have been doing really well with it, giving great answers and coming up with good questions concerning the unit.

Yesterday, we conducted a practice Lockdown drill, and for all intense purposes, students did really well. Like Fire and Tornado Drills, this is something that schools will start to practice, because if anything were to happen, we want the students to be as prepared as possible to remain safe. Please talk to your children about this and tell them that they must follow the directions precisely and remain silent during the drills.

I hope everyone continues to have a good week, and I'm going to end with a shout-out to two students who are currently sick and will be out for the remainder of the week. Eric and Megan - get well soon!