November 25, 2009

Service

Seabury Middle School students Tuesday spent three hours sorting 6,000 (three tons!) of red beans at Northwest Harvest for distribution to hungry families across Washington. The Middle Schoolers worked hard and efficiently and got some great feedback from the Northwest Harvest volunteer coordinators. Here’s what our students had to say about the experience:

Petria: “On Tuesday I went to northwest harvest with the rest of Seabury Middle School. We were told that we were going to be packaging beans. We were led into a huge warehouse that looked like Costco. There were huge pallets of food stacked everywhere. Soon we found ourselves in a packaging center. With a high school group there, we were going form an assembly line to package the beans.

There were different jobs to form the assembly line. There were packagers who scooped beans from huge sacks into smaller bags, tiers who knotted the small bags closed, runners who brought scooped bags to the tiers, boxers who boxed 25 pounds of beans into boxed after they had been tied, and box makers who made the boxes out of flattened pieces of cardboard. It took a lot of hard work, but it was definitely worth it.”

Emmet: “Northwest Harvest is a great place to go to help stop hunger. Even just for a little amount of time, if you’re working hard, you can provide for hundreds for families. And with N.W.H. serving 200,000 food banks it really pays off.

You also get to know other people whether there form a different organization for families that volunteer. One of the great things that I have learned from going there is that even if one can only help a little it can still make a big help for the people who need it.”

Elise: “When we went to NW Harvest, we had no clue what we would be doing, only that it would help some people who were down on their luck … It only took a little bit of effort, and yet it will save hundreds of families from risk of starvation. If everyone in the country were to help out their local food distribution organizations just one day a month, then millions of lives would be helped out.

Because the job was so easy, it seems like it’s not much to ask for people to come to volunteer, and thus to save lives. It was really fun, and I hope that we can go back again sometime.”

English

We have embarked on an expository writing project – This I Believe. This past week, students have started by defining a wide variety of values and identifying five that are of greatest importance to us individually. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we are asking students to conduct interviews of three or four adults that will be gathered with you during this time. The students have the information necessary to conduct these interviews. The objective here is to have students interface with adults that are important in their lives and to gather information and stories that illustrate the values that have become essential in living a fulfilled life.

Baking

To wind up our short week, we spent our Wednesday half-day playing games, working on Thanksgiving-related projects, and baking!

Students formed teams and made pumpkin pies, snickerdoodles and English toffee (with pecans and without, for those with allergies). We hope you enjoy the results over the long weekend.

Big thank-you to Brenda Bono for purchasing our baking supplies, and to Sue Frederickson for providing us with baking dishes and utensils.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

November 20, 2009

Middle Schoolers produced a great music program Tuesday. Performances ranged from African drum music, to The Beatles, to songs written by our students.

Thank you all for making time in your schedule to attend that fine performance!

English: Students are continuing with their independent reading books. We will begin to write book analyses next week.

Science: Seabury parents Nicole and Wes Cooper held a map and compass discussion with students on Friday.

Math: Sixth Grade finished Chapter 2, working on integers and coordinate graphing. Chapter 3 begins work on solving equations with integers.

Seventh Grade: Fractions have been the focus this week. Next week students will work on solving equations with rational numbers.

Coming up: Middle School students have worked this week to gather non-perishable food items to bring with us to Northwest Harvest on Tuesday. We are taking part in a service project next week that will see students and teachers working at Northwest Harvest’s Kent distribution center, packing boxes of food for hungry families.

For our half-day Wednesday, we will be cooking Thanksgiving desserts that students will bring home to share with their families. We will finalize our recipe plans today, and will send out the call for extra baking sheets, pie tins, etc. by Monday afternoon.

Please remember that dismissal is at 11:30 on Wednesday.

November 13, 2009

The students took a week 2 spelling test this week. Overall I’ve been really pleased with how seriously the students are approaching their work in vocabulary. The other day Halley observed students using some new vocabulary words during lunch (in the context of wresting Halloween candy away from each other).

One of the things I’ve noticed is kids beginning to use the words they’ve encountered in 1100 Words in their daily oral language, as well as pointing out words they come across in literature. Students must complete their independent reading books by Friday, Nov. 20, and we will begin focusing on elements of stories.

Gutterball: Finals were today. This has been a highly engaging process where students just did a phenomenal job of working collaboratively to come up with a design for their Gutterball track. Tracks were judged based on four categories: Fastest, slowest through the course, best tricks, most number of spirals.

Take-apart Center: We are initiating the Take Apart Center and need your donations! We will accept any unit that we can take a part (without putting it back together or repairing…). For example: typewriters, old computers, sewing machines, vcr’s,…. The idea here is to have students learn to use hand tools and to understand better how things work!

Math: Work has mainly focused on adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative integers and fractions.

Last week was our first Continental Math League competition. Be on the lookout for the results in the Friday Folder.

Technology class wasn’t held this week due to the Veteran’s Day holiday.

Music: Students have been working on some theory but mostly practicing for the November 17th performance in their small groups and whole group.

French: Students have continued their work on numbers, irregular verbs and conversational skills.

Middle School Conferences: Thank you for making time to meet with us for conferences. We were very pleased with how well the conferences went and proud of the role that the students took in the conversation. Having the students involved in the conference contributes into their taking greater ownership of their learning, their performance, and understanding the expectations of them. When students are asked to reflect on their performance in meaningful ways, their understanding of themselves as learners deepens.

If you have any thoughts stemming from your conference or have reflections on the conference process, please email us with these ideas – they will help shape our work with your child and the assessment tools we use.

English: We continue our work in 1,100 words with a test on Friday on Week 4.

For the past two weeks, we have begun working on summarization skills – taking short essays and identifying the main points, developing an outline, and finally writing a summary. This is a challenging set of skills to master and we will be working on acquiring these skills as they are vital to writing research papers.

We will be going to the library on Friday to select an Independent Reading Book.

Take-apart Center: We are initiating the Take Apart Center and need your donations! We will accept any unit that we can take a part (without putting it back together or repairing…). For example: typewriters, old computers, sewing machines, vcr’s,…. The idea here is to have students learn to use hand tools and to understand better how things work!

We could also use hand tools: screw drivers (especially small headed ones), wrenches, socket wrenches, pliers,… NO HAMMERS ALLOWED!

Math: Students have been exploring basic algebraic concepts at various skill levels. Defining variables, solving basic equations, working with positive and negative integers, and function tables have all been topics of focus. Some students are working on converting positive and negative fractions to decimals and vice versa.

Also, Friday the 6th is our first Continental Math League competition. Students will get their results on Monday.

Social Studies and Science: A couple weeks ago, we introduced a project that has captured the students’ attention in a huge way: Gutterball! Using the materials provided (wood, hot glue, popsicle sticks, and four 8-foot lengths of pipe insulation for each group) , students are constructing tracks for marbles. There are three categories in which to complete: fastest time, slowest time, and best tricks. We’ll be using this project to tease out some physics principles next week. There are photos of the projects up on the Photos page!

Once this project is done, we’ll be starting a very cool new project related to our fall field study trip involving using topographic maps to create 3-dimensional scale models… More details soon.

Technology: Students are using Outlook to keep track of their homework and communicate regarding school issues. In Tech class, they’ve been using Google Earth and learning how to burn cds and dvds.

Music Students have been working on some theory but mostly practicing for the November 17th performance in their small groups and whole group.

French: Students have continued their work on numbers, irregular verbs and conversational skills.

November 6, 2009

Middle School Conferences

Thank you for making time to meet with us for conferences. We were very pleased with how well the conferences went and proud of the role that the students took in the conversation. Having the students involved in the conference contributes into their taking greater ownership of their learning, their performance, and understanding the expectations of them. When students are asked to reflect on their performance in meaningful ways, their understanding of themselves as learners deepens.

If you have any thoughts stemming from your conference or have reflections on the conference process, please email us with these ideas – they will help shape our work with your child and the assessment tools we use.

English

We continue our work in 1,100 words with a test on Friday on Week 4.

For the past two weeks, we have begun working on summarization skills – taking short essays and identifying the main points, developing an outline, and finally writing a summary. This is a challenging set of skills to master and we will be working on acquiring these skills as they are vital to writing research papers.

We will be going to the library on Friday to select an Independent Reading Book.

Take-apart Center

We are initiating the Take Apart Center and need your donations! We will accept any unit that we can take a part (without putting it back together or repairing…). For example: typewriters, old computers, sewing machines, vcr’s,…. The idea here is to have students learn to use hand tools and to understand better how things work!
We could also use hand tools: screw drivers (especially small headed ones), wrenches, socket wrenches, pliers,… NO HAMMERS ALLOWED!

Math

Students have been exploring basic algebraic concepts at various skill levels. Defining variables, solving basic equations, working with positive and negative integers, and function tables have all been topics of focus. Some students are working on converting positive and negative fractions to decimals and vice versa.

Also, Friday the 6th is our first Continental Math League competition. Students will get their results on Monday.

Social Studies and Science

A couple weeks ago, we introduced a project that has captured the students’ attention in a huge way: Gutterball! Using the materials provided (wood, hot glue, popsicle sticks, and four 8-foot lengths of pipe insulation for each group) , students are constructing tracks for marbles. There are three categories in which to complete: fastest time, slowest time, and best tricks. We’ll be using this project to tease out some physics principles next week. There are photos of the projects up on the Photos page!

Once this project is done, we’ll be starting a very cool new project related to our fall field study trip involving using topographic maps to create 3-dimensional scale models… More details soon.

Technology

Students are using Outlook to keep track of their homework and communicate regarding school issues. In Tech class, they’ve been using Google Earth and learning how to burn cds and dvds.

Music

Students have been working on some theory but mostly practicing for the November 17th performance in their small groups and whole group.

French

Students have continued their work on numbers, irregular verbs and conversational skills.