This Week: September 15-19

I hope you all had a great weekend!

This week, we will start off each day with 8 to Great Highway 3: Full Responsibility. During this time, we will focus on the importance of being responsible for our own actions. We will learn what it means to go from from B.C. to A.D.(Blaming and Complaing to Acting and Dreaming). We will be talking about "shoulds". Sometimes we are hard on ourselves (or on other people) because of the things we think we (or they) "should" do. We will discover how to turn a "should do" into a "want to".

Tomorrow we will get to break up into groups based on ability in Math and Language Arts. Students will switch classes during those times and may or may not be with their homeroom teacher (me) during those times.

This Monday after lunch we will not have community experts yet. During that time we will work on our first project - our class website. This site will be designed by the kids and will include fun info about our class. Hopefully we can even set up a link to include this blog on the site. Each student has a part in this project whether it be web design, gathering information from each student, incorporating graphics, audio and visual effects, editing, etc.

PE will be in the ping pong area this week! Dont forget we have PE every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.

During the next two weeks our class will also be involved in a mini history project. I just read a fascinating book called Are We Rome? by Cullen Murphy. It compares the rise and fall of Rome to America today. We will look at some similar issues such as government infrastructure, our attitude toward our borders, citizenship, and the military. This project will cover the CA standards for all three grade levels in history as 6th graders learn about the Rise of Rome, 7th graders learn about the Fall of Rome and 8th graders learn about U.S. History. This project will lead us right into a fun math mini project I am designing to cover the upcoming presidential elections.

This Friday will be our first experience with our Community Partnerships. I will give you more information on that as I get it.

Looking forward to an awesome week. For your info...I will post every Sunday and Friday. Sundays note will take a look at the week ahead. Fridays note will tell you how the week went!