Since Mondays are becoming so busy and Friday afternoons I seem to have more time, I am going to try and start posting a look ahead on Fridays. We will see if I can be more consistent with that.
I am looking forward to meeting many parents on Tuesday night during open house. Also, with open house being late this year, I am hoping that more people will be reading this in the future! We are starting to dive into Roman history right now with the video: Rome: Engineering and Empire. This is a long one and I like to teach during the video so it's taking up most of the week. We should be finishing up Monday. Then we will move into Roman Geography and start reading one of our two Roman History books. We also took a test this week on 15 major events in ancient history. You can see the scores on Powerschool. Some students did great, others need to be studying this weekend so they can come see me at lunch and do a re-take by Monday or Tuesday. Please e-mail me or message me on Instagram (@fischerclass) if you have any questions. Have a great weekend!
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We are having a bit of a strange week this week. Our two amazing counselors: Mr. Schuldheisz and Mrs. Sievers are in my classroom today and tomorrow to do an Anti-Bullying workshop with the sixth graders. So that is chopping up the week for Ancient History a bit.
In Ancient, we are starting on our study of Rome this week. We are also continuing to work on our Ancient History Timeline which will be tested in one week on Tuesday the 27th. We started a video overview of Ancient Rome and there is a packet that goes with that. We will be working on that all week. Next week, after we take the Ancient Timeline Test, we will start studying World Geography. We will also be working on non-fiction reading strategies as we continue to study Ancient Rome. It has been a busy week of instruction and I haven't felt like I had time to breath let alone type a blog. Things are going well so far so many student's made excellent progress on their Earth's History Calendar. Those scores are in the gradebook now for a couple of classes and I am still working working on getting the other two classes entered. Parents and Students are reminded that you can re-take or make up any assignment you want to within a reasonable time frame. My focus is on you learning the concepts so if it takes a couple of extra days to get it then that's great!
We are going to finish up our Ancient History Timeline today and the test on that will likely be next Friday. You will be starting to see the pre-test in the gradebook but none of the students knew any of the dates so they all got 0's. Please remember that these pre-tests don't count towards their grade they are just a tool to show growth. I full expect that next week when the test counts they will have learned a lot of material. Also, today we are going to start doing Mindfulness of breath. This technique is a great anchor for students who are needing to create some space between their stimulus and their response. I am enjoying the new the Apple Watch app called Breath which is fantastic for this practice. Let me know if you have any questions. Week 2 is live! I am a day behind on my blog for the week because we have been so busy. I feel like I have been talking to the students for a week straight. So..... it's finally time for me to shut up and give some work! We are starting with a textbook scavenger hunt. Most of the classes just barely got going on that today so they will have a lot of time tomorrow and even Friday if needed to finish up.
You may have heard from your students that we are continuing to work on mindfulness. We did some more work in all of classes. We are practicing mindfulness of sounds. We will keep working on that through the week so I challenged them to try it home for a minute or so and see how the do. Parents you can try too! Just find a mindful posture (relaxed but alert) and listen to the sounds in the world around you without judgement) Nothing to it! We also talked about using mindfulness of sound to create SPACE between our stimulus and our reaction to it. So maybe one of you might catch yourself before you have a reaction that is harmful to others or to yourself. The first grades are entered and I am already hearing from some parents. Remember, Pre-tests don't count towards a final grade!!!!!!!!!! I put them in the gradebook so we all can see growth. So you will see those from time to time in the gradebook, don't be alarmed. Students should be failing the pre-test, it means they don't know the information. Which is good, it means I have something to teach them! I will give them a post-test soon to see if they learned anything. There are several students who have not shown their parents the class expectations, that is a 10 point assignment and I will still take those this week for full credit. Thanks for reading, let me know if you have questions in the comments or send me an e-mail. The Instagram has been fun so give me a follow if you can and feel free to leave a comment! |
AuthorThis is the official blog for Room 113 at Desert Hills Middle School. Archives
February 2017
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