Weekly Review. Friday, April 28th.

Weekly Review. Friday, April  28th.   Written entirely by the 6th graders.

This is the first week back from vacation and it has been busy. Some of us went away and some of us stayed home. It has also been a very disjointed week because we had D-Day activities on Tuesday and student-led conferences on Thursday.

Student-led conferences are meetings with our parents and advisers. Many  schools have parent-teacher conferences but in our middle school we have conferences led by the students. We prepared first by reading through our reports and writing down our strengths and weaknesses. We also found examples to show our positive learning experiences and work that was challenging. Our final task was to create an agenda with strengths, weaknesses and two goals. The third goal was made collaboratively in the classroom by our parents, teachers and us. For some of us it was very nerve wracking and for those who did it last year it was easier.

We are starting our end of the year reports on Ancient Greek topics and we have just finished our main question with smaller sub questions. Our next step is to complete a full set of notes on an online tool that is called NoodleBib. Our report has to be 6-12 pages in length including pictures, maps, time lines and a bibliography. Today we are going over all the guidelines for our reports which are due at the end of May. In addition to the written part, we are going to use a Web 2.0 tool to help us present an important topic from our report.

Tonight is a special movie night for middle schoolers.  We are showing the James Bond Goldfinger movie.  We are also having a raffle to make money for our student council.

We are beginning our study of the Persian Empire… Keep reading for more.

WEEKLY REVIEW. FRIDAY APRIL 8TH

Weekly Review. Friday, April 8th. Written entirely by the 6th graders.

We have had a very busy two weeks. The suspense is over and we have conquered Nature’s Classroom. We had a lot of fun but we had to return early because of the expected snow storm 🙁   We returned to school Friday and the teachers planned a very exiting day for us. The faculty decided to take the middle school students who attended school bowling, then to see the new Diary of A Wimpy Kid movie, Rodrick Rules. It was the best school day ever 🙂

Nature’s Classroom was a great hands on learning experience for the middle school. We had field group and activities every day. Some of our favorites were, feed your face, back to basics, fishing, survival, building your own civilization, snake dissection and meditation. We went to Hammanassett State Beach on the Long Island Sound to study marine biology. During our visit we saw a resting seal in the sand. He eventually went back into the sea. We saw other seals on a rocky island. It was a tiring but exiting day.

One of the important parts of dinning at Nature’s Classroom is ORT. It is the food that we put on our plates and didn’t eat. The ORT from each meal was weighed and recorded. Our heaviest was five pounds and the lightest was 1/4 of a pound.

Coming soon to Shirley’s 6th grade blog will be posts about all of our adventures.

Weekly Review Tuesday, March 22nd by the 6th graders

Weekly Review Tuesday, March 22nd by the 6th graders

This week, we began a new project on Athens and Sparta. We split into two groups,  the Athenians and the Spartans. The two groups will debate against each other on which city is the strongest, most powerful and the best place to live. Each student invented a Greek name, character and background for themself. The class decided on several main topics, and each student chose a few to study and research. We are preparing for the debate by researching, planning and communicating with our group.

We started a new unit on poetry. Our class began with reciting Robert Burns poetry and taking part in World Read aloud Day (more information below). We read lots of different poems and wrote about them in our writer’s pads. One of our homework assignments was to write a poem based on another poem we wrote in class. Eventually, each student will publish their poems using different platforms.

Next Monday, the middle school is going to Natures Classroom in Connecticut, for five days. We will be doing fun activities and studying Marine Biology. The hardest thing for some of the students will be leaving all their technology at home since we are a technology based school. We are looking forward to experience learning outside of our usual environment. For some of us, this will be our first adventure away from home.

Another development in our humanities class, is the acquiring of some new seats. They are big yoga balls with legs so they don’t roll away. The seats are blue, comfy and fun! We are all tempted to race around the classroom on them but our teacher said we couldn’t. Our class has only four balls, so we take turns and have a chart to mark off.

Weekly Review, Tuesday, March 1st

Weekly Review, Tuesday, March 1st

We just came back from mid-winter break. Our class is almost finished with our glogs about The Twelve Labors of Heracles and they will be put on our wiki about Ancient Greece. We are putting our final touches on our memoirs stories that we have been working so hard to complete. The sixth grade finished reading The Lightning Thief over vacation and we really enjoyed it. Now we are planning final projects to end our studies. Today we began to read The Children’s Homer by Padraic Colum which is a shortened version of the Illiad and the Odyssey. It is about the Trojan war and Odysseus’s adventures before he returns home to Ithaca.

Weekly Review. Monday, February 7th

Weekly Review.  Monday, February 7th

This week we are working on The 12 Labors of Heracles. Everyone has a partner and each partnership is making a Glog about their chosen labor. Glogs are like online posters with audio, video and animation that can be shared with the world. Our class has been working on recreating Minoan and Mycenaean artwork. Each student chose a piece of art to replicate. Some of the pieces chosen are, The Agamemnon Mask (not really his death mask), The Bull Leaping fresco, an Octopus Pot, a dolphin fresco, and some amazing gold jewelry. We are first sketching the outline of our piece with a pencil and then coloring the picture with Cray-Pas. As a class, we began to read The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Some of our classmates suggested that we read it as a class because it is a great book and is connected to our Greek studies. So far everyone is enjoying this book even those who are skeptics and all those who already read the book.

Weekly Review,

Weekly Review  Monday, January 24th

We have had four snow days so far this year which means we are behind on our school work. However, we have found an educational social media site called Edmodo, so we can communicate with our entire grade and have an online class on a snow day.We tried it for the first time on Friday and some of us found it rather confusing. If there is a snow day this week we will try it again and hopefully it will be easier. The display in Edmodo is a lot like Facebook but when you chat it’s in a safe environment.

Weekly Review…Thursday, December 16th

Weekly Review

Thursday, December 16th. This is our last week before our winter vacation and it’s been very busy! The Edublog Challenge is coming to an end and we finished our final posts on  Challenge 10. The challenges have helped us become stronger writers, better bloggers and we now know how to use some new technology tools. We were excited to hear that one of our classmates, Alexandra, won an award for the Win! Win! Win! challenge.

The whole 6th grade will be teaching topics about Ancient Crete to each other after vacation. Each partnership/group is working on a presentation on their specific topic which we will share with the class. We hope to create a useful learning Wiki site where we will post our information. In these presentations we need to include, visual, written, oral and reading materials.

Since our last weekly review, we have progressed with our memoirs.  We are now sharing our paragraphs with the class and our memoir partners. Our class has been reading excerpts from two books, Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff and The Giver by Lois Lowry. These books have given us ideas on how to write with descriptive, emotional and interesting language.

Monday, November 29th


Thanksgiving break is over and we are back at school and ready to learn! We have neared the end of our Greek Gods and Goddesses project and they are proudly standing on Mt. Olympus (a.k.a. our classroom wall). Our next project is about ancient Crete and we the students will be the teachers. More information to follow. In class, we paired up with partners and talked about three special memories. We brought in three items that represent the memories that we had chosen. We had to tell the stories and narrow it down to one that we would write about.

Tuesday, November 9th

Weekly Review written by 6th grade

Our 6th grade humanities class just finished our first test of the year on the Lucy videos. It was fair and not to difficult for us to complete. The next day, we picked another article from Newsweek to present to the class.  Before our presentation, we summarized the facts in bullet notes and now we are writing paragraphs about it. We started to read a new book on Greek Gods and Goddesses by W.H.D. Rouse and are comparing it to another Greek book on Gods and Goddesses by D’Aulaires.

This past week we also Skyped with a class from MO. We talked to them about our towns and our school and they responded with information about their school and local area. They were surprised to find out that we call our teachers by their first names and we do not wear uniforms. We all thought it was fun and educational to communicate with them.

All 6th grade students recently took part in family conferences. This is a time where students discuss how they are doing in all subjects with their parents and adviser. Today we looked at a Turkish blog from a university in Istanbul and we are going to comment on their posts.

Thursday, October 21st

Weekly Review – Written by 6th graders

This week we completed the Lucy videos. We really enjoyed watching them and we are sad that we have finished the series. Our class discussed the Chilean mining disaster and brought in three items that we wish we would have had if we were trapped in the mine.  We are taking pictures of the items and making a voice thread about them.  The whole sixth grade are finishing our Greek gods and goddesses project and are still deciding what platform to use for our presentation.  Halloween is coming soon and we are anxiously waiting for the phone call to the winner of the competition.  Today we are going to be discussing  facts about Edgar Allan Poe  and sharing some of his work. Here is a useful Poe site.