Summer Reading Project

The students of Wildcat were the rulers of the second floor today since the 7th and 8th graders were off to Point Reyes for a week. While they won't get a chance to actually see their school mates from the upper grades, on Thursday the 6th graders will be heading out to Point Reyes for a day trip of their own.


During English today the students worked in groups of threes on a project with one of the books they read over the summer. The three most popular books were The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Stargirl, and Tangerine. The groups discussed characters, setting, conflict and plot, and they started creating book covers based on their discussions.


Homework: 30 minutes reading of any book of your choice. Please remember to record your reading in your reading log.

The Bear That Wasn't

In Language Arts today, focusing on grammar, we continued our identification of words that represent "things and stuff," as opposed to words that are describers. We then developed a way of diagramming a sentence by putting an N over all nouns, and drawing arrows from the describer to the noun being described.

In the sentence;
Bobby bit Barry's burger. 
We would put an N over Bobby and burger, and then we would draw arrows from Barry's to burger, showing that Barry's is a describer that is describing burger.


The goal of this work is get the students to look at grammar and parts of speech as something that changes depending on context.


In Cultural Studies, the class worked on bio poems that asked them to explore how they thought about themselves. When asked why they thought we were focusing on their own sense of identity one of the students answered,
     "Individuals make up communities and cultures so we have to start by looking at individuals."


We finished the class by watching the 10 minute video of The Bear That Wasn't, and then talking about what the video said about how we see ourselves versus how we are seen by others.


Homework:
Reading: ongoing. Read for 30 minutes and record your reading in the reading at home
Literature: Please complete this survey about your summer reading by Thursday, September 16th. section of your reading journal.
Cultural Studies:  Please finish your bio-poem and bring it to class tomorrow.

Community Agreements and We Are On Our Way!

So last Thursday two of our representatives met with six representatives from the 7th & 8th grades, and Middle School Cultural Studies and Science teacher, Simon Hurd, and they hashed out the final three community agreements that the Middle School will agree to abide by for the school year. The agreements were as follows:

We agree to respect ourselves and the community.
We agree to be open minded, responsible, and positively engaged.
We agree to try to Behave Exceed expectations Succeed Take risks.

We will spend the rest of the year exploring what these agreements look, sound, and feel like in a learning community.

Today in Language Arts we revisited nouns, and identified that usually a noun is a word that is a representer, such as
The student lost her book.
and sometimes words that we think of as nouns may be really describers, such as,
The student lost her book bag

Homework:
Reading: ongoing. Read for 30 minutes and record your reading in the reading at home section of your reading journal.
Language Arts: due Tuesday, September 14th. Complete questions #1 to #5 of the noun handout you were given.
Literature: Please complete this survey about your summer reading by Thursday, September 16th.

2010/2011 School Year

Here we go everybody! The 2010/2011 school year has begun. It was great working with everyone of you today. I was very impressed with the work you did around creating community agreements. I noticed students thinking, listening to others, and negotiating respectfully.  The three community agreements that we came up with were:

• Keep a Positive Attitude.
• Take Risks in Your Learning.
• Respect Your Surrounding

The next stage in this process will be for two representatives from our class to meet with representatives from the seventh and eighth grades, decide on the final three community agreements.

Homework:
Reading; ongoing. Students should read for 30 minutes five days a week. Remember to fill out your reading log.

Cultural Studies; due Wednesday, September 8th. All students should finish their spider identity charts.