Halloween Looms Before Us...

Whew! What a busy couple of weeks we have had here in the sixth grade. The coming month is filling fast with a number of activities and projects. Let's start with next week!

Halloween

On Tuesday, October 31st, we will be holding our Halloween party at 1:40pm. It will go for an hour. I have one parent volunteer helping to gather food, but could use a couple more for food prep and general support throughout the party time. If you would like to join us, please feel free to send a quick email, and I'll put your name on the list.

Scrip

The sixth grade is starting a new fundraiser. We will be selling Scrip. If you have never purchased scrip before, it is basically buying gift cards for local stores and getting a cut of the value of the card. For instance, we get 4% of every Fred Meyer gift card we sell.

In the past, the office has sent home scrip information, placed the orders, etc. However, very few people participated. We plan to change this! The sixth grade team is pre-purchasing gift cards to sell directly to families! We think we will have a lot of success and have a lot of ideas on how to boost interest.

Here's where you could help: we need a few parent volunteers who would be willing to man Scrip tables 1-2 times a month, maybe help place and organize orders, or coordinate volunteers. Other than working a Scrip table, much of the scrip work could be done from home. If this sounds like something you would be interested in helping with, please let me know.

The Fun Stuff

We had another visit from Nate, our mini-boat expert, on Monday. We worked on priming our vessels, designing flags and stickers, working on our first letter to the sister school in Japan, and putting the finishing touches on our instructions if our boat is lost. Our time with Nate is busy, loud, but incredibly productive. Not only are our students learning more about boats, but the writing and organization of this project is proving a valuable experience for the kids.

Everyone is busy working on the boat project.

What Else?

Finally, this week we should be wrapping up our partner interview projects. My hope is we can hold a gallery walk of the projects early next week. I am so impressed with the quality of multi-media project that students are producing this year.

We are also taking our first unit test in reading, to assess where students are at with their independent reading and comprehension levels, completing a persuasive writing pre-assessment, we have science test over genetics early next week, and are still hard at work on our geography simulation. As you can see, there is never a dull moment in sixth grade!

When the camera comes out, they get a bit distracted! However, these are your students hard at work on the second assessment of the day!

Have a great rest of the week!

-Ms. Kinsman