And Now the Fun Begins!

I hope you all had an excellent back-to-school week! I know I was exhausted by Friday afternoon, and expect many of your students were tired, as well. Now that the fun of the first week is over, we will spend the upcoming week experiencing some of the more "normal" routines of sixth grade. 

On Monday, we will be breaking our students into their new math classes. It is a lot of fun to teach different groups of students throughout the day, and a good opportunity for your student to practice moving from one teacher to another. All the sixth grade teachers are looking forward to getting to know your students.

We are also starting our first language arts story, conducting a partner interview in writing, and beginning our geography unit in social studies. I guarantee it will be a busy week! On Friday, you can also expect your student's first homework assignment. More information will follow.

Finally, as part of the partner interview project, your student will be making an awesome multi-media presentation using an app called AdobeSpark. It is a wonderful, free (with no ads!), resource, which allows each student to create their own narrated slide show about a fellow classmate. This was a hugely successful project last year, with one exception: using only one Google Account for logging into the program made it nearly impossible to save the different projects without overwriting data. 

Last year, I kept track of student writing assignments using a Google Drive account shared by my whole class. However, it was challenging for each learner to keep their Google docs, presentations, and other projects protected, as the whole class could access one another's work. As a result, I am asking parents to explore creating Google accounts for your student. It is a relatively easy process, with a lot of information from Google about how to protect your young user. If you do create an account for your student, please make sure they know the user name and password. This way they can create a completely secure AdobeSpark project, and access the Google tools from school to work on and save assignments. 

If you have any questions about creating a Google account, please do not hesitate to reach out. I have a link to my school account to the right of the screen. I'll be sure to answer any email questions as promptly as possible. 

Thank you for all your support this past week. I am looking forward to seeing your students tomorrow morning!