Good morning! (Edlio delivers the newsletters at varying times on Sundays/Mondays, so it may not be morning anymore when you receive this weekly update!)  It's been a busy weekend of CYO basketball fun, with two more 6th grade games on my schedule this weekend! Go Royals!

 

STM News and Dates You Can Use: Thank you for the donations to the St. Lucy Food Drive!  The school really showed up with donations and the Knights of Columbus were loading the St. Lucy truck this weekend. We will be excited to learn the final amount (in pounds of food!) donated by STM. It was also a big "hashtag Catholic School" week, as we call it in Rm. 9: Ash Wednesday Mass, Friday Mass, and then ("whoa! We are going to church three times this week, Mrs. Morgan?") Stations of the Cross at 2pm. This week we will attend Confessions on Wednesday morning at 9am and school Mass on Friday at 10am. There is an 11:30am dismissal on Friday, Mar. 11 and No School for students on Monday, March 14th. The Auction is on Saturday at 6:30pm at Knights of Columbus (I donated a Day at the Smithsonian for Four, lunch included, so I hope someone wants to invite three friends a field trip this summer)!  Keep the shorts packed away for a few more weeks - Spring Uniform switch is March 21st. 

 

Academic News: The second trimester ends on Friday, March 11th. The PowerSchool portal will close on Monday, March 7, and I am planning to have all grades as updated as possible by the end of the day today (March 6) so that you have a complete view of your students' grades with no surprises. Remember that LA is often the grade that students stress about the most, and the 6th grade took a very slow and deliberate three-part route through the Verbs unit (as they will in 7th grade as well.)

 

LA 6: Please ask your student if he/she has turned in a complete Parental Persuasive piece of writing and the Advertising assignment in Google Classroom. Both of these items have been hanging out in Google Classroom for two weeks or more and the deadline has approached and will pass by with a zero or half credit if no work (or some work) is submitted. 

 

We will begin the Adverbs unit this week. The Adverbs unit is short and sweet. The type of writing coming up next is Business Letter Writing. This is such a fun writing exercise for the students.  We will write both complimentary and complaint letters to businesses with whom the students have experienced. (There are a lot of complimentary letters to Olive Garden and complaint letters that go to airlines over the years!) 

 

Reading 6: This week we will finish In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord. Each student has his/her own labeled school copy of the book. We will further study similes from the second half of the book and write a short structured reflection piece on how Shirley successfully meshes her new American life and honors her Chinese heritage. As noted last week in the newsletter, the students will be taking a break from Vocabulary in Action while we reintroduce Word Study into 6th grade.

 

Reading 7: Please ask your student if he/she has turned in the structured reflection pieces for Heart of a Samurai. These items have been hanging out in Google Classroom for two weeks or more and the deadline has approached and will pass by with a zero or half credit if no work or some work is submitted. Class time and teacher support was provided for two class periods on Monday and Tuesday of this week, so the final two assignments should have been completed. The Part 4 and Part 5 Heart of a Samurai Reading Checks will be posted in Google Classroom shortly. Thank you! Each student has received a name-labeled school copy of Zero Tolerance by Claudia Mills. This is a short, fast, read and the expectation is that students have already read half of the book in the past two weeks, with the next two weeks to finish reading. 

 

Reading 6 and Reading 7: STM Curriculum Committee is arranging additional teachers for book talks on Thursdays to facilitate more in-depth small group/ book club-type instruction and learning. This will begin during the third trimester. I am very grateful to Mrs. Stocker, Mrs. Thomas, Mrs. Rimicci, and Mrs. Pacheco for assisting with this initiative. There will be a wider variety of books read, and with more faculty assistance, smaller book groups. I will keep you posted!

 

Religion 6: This week the students will begin Chapter 12, Learning God's Way. More information about this chapter can be found at https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/lpress-craft/files/col2016-files/Christourlife2016-study-gd-g6-ch13.pdf

 

Have a wonderful week, beginning today on the First Sunday of Lent!

 

Mrs. Morgan