Conference week! :) If you are not scheduled for a group conference I truly hope to see you during one of the arena sessions! Most students are doing quite well with Washington State History (we had a quiz on Friday) - and the Literature Circle on the novel Shakespeare's Secret --- this book combined nicely with our speaker Dr. Delahoyd from WSU - and has been very well received! Hopefully your student has shared some bits of the book with you and the DeVere conspiracy theory -- fun stuff! ---- Most students have been able to finish up their required reading and work on their lit. packet during class - a few have been checking out a book and doing some work at home --- this is our last week with the book for blocks 2 and 3 and block 1 should finish up next week. Our big focus for this week is POE --- otherwise known as "Poe Fest" --- The Tell Tale Heart is in our Lit. book - so we read that in it's entirety and then we do an overview of a variety of other works such as The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, Annabell Lee --- etc.... Should be a good time! Hope to see you this week!

Sorry it's been awhile without a post - filter issues with my district computer :( OK- to get you up to date....in the last couple of weeks we have finished our group maps and the scoring of these will wrap up tomorrow (would have been today, but the ch. 3 kids were gone to Q6). We also completed our PNW map test. There were quite a few perfect scores, and quite a few not so perfect scores. For those that struggled - lack of preparation was probably the issue - but good news, the group map project carries enough points to offset moderately poor test scores. We also watched a couple of short videos - Sculpted by Floods and Mud Slide - both dealing with the geology and climate of Washington. If you have an Mt. St. Helens memories, consider sharing them with your student :)

Today we started a new novel - Shakespeare's Secret - it is an intriguing mystery that also delves into bullying and other issues of "fitting in" -- I decided to go with this novel at this stage of the year largely because we will have a guest speaker, Dr. Michael Delahoyd of WSU's English department on Thursday - and he will be talking about some conspiracy theories related to Shakespeare - this same mystery is followed in our novel --- should be fun!!!

Also....in a quick apology - I hope to get the Music and Me papers returned by Monday and the book projects by late next week. This is an unusually slow turn around time for me. The death of my father near the end of the summer - followed by another family death - had me a bit off my game at the beginning of the school year in regards to energy for grading. I'm getting back up to speed, so please accept my apology and look for faster turn arounds in the future :)

Thank you to everyone who helped your student with supplies for the map projects - they really do produce some creative (and accurate) replicas of our state :) Hope you're all enjoying this lingering lovely weather!!!