Weekly Update 4/7-11

IMPORTANT REMINDERS/EVENTS:

The end of the grading period is April 11; please encourage your children to pay close attention to individual teacher deadlines. Report Cards will be sent home April 23rd.

8th Grade End-of-Year activities are approaching in the coming months, most notably our 8th Grade trip to Schlitterbahn-Galveston and our 8th grade Promotion Ceremony. Information packets were sent home this week. Please read over the material and be aware of money/form deadlines to ensure your child can attend/participate in everything we have planned. It is a memorable time for our students.

Friday, May 23—Schlitterbahn and Activity Fest
Wednesday, May 28—Academic Celebration
Thursday, May 29—Promotion Ceremony at Butler Field House

Chaperones for the Schlitterbahn trip and volunteers to help set up/decorate/chaperone other events are needed. If you are an HISD approved volunteer and are interested in chaperoning, please let any of us know and we will pass on your offer to the appropriate people. If you are not an HISD approved volunteer but want to become one, please email Ms. Deitra Kendrick a dkendric@houstonisd.org or call her at 713-295-6500 x 326 for detail.

From PTO:

Tuesday, April 8, 6:30 pm
Pin Oak PTO General Meeting: Preparing for College

The Pin Oak MS PTO invites all parents to a General Meeting on April 8, 2008. The meeting starts at 6:30 pm with presentations by Pin Oak PTO President, Ann Nichols, and Pin Oak Principal, Michael McDonough. They will speak about school and PTO accomplishments this year.

At 7 pm, we welcome speaker Paula Fendley, HISD College and Career Readiness Coordinator. Ms. Fendley will speak to parents about preparing for college. This program is appropriate for 6th through 8th grade parents. We hope to see you there!

PIN OAK IDOL:
We are having our third & final meeting for "Pin Oak Idol". I would like to get everyone together for this final planning secession. We need your help & guidance with this event. I'm hopeful that some of you have worked this event in the past & have ideas, knowledge or suggestions that we can use to make this a successful project. The event is currently scheduled for Friday May 16th. Auditions will be held on April 9th & 10th at 4:00 - 5:15 at the school.


English:

We will be working on “Laying the Foundations” activities. The Laying the Foundations assessment is in May; exact date, TBA. Soon, we will begin reading The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros in class. No purchase of the book will be necessary.

EXTRA CREDIT—I have an extra credit assignment that has been posted in my room. If your child would like to take advantage of it, please note the deadline of April 4. In addition to this opportunity, I will be giving some extra credit points for any student who decides to participate in our 8th Grade Class Project, “The Kindness Quilt.” A handout was sent home before Spring Break. The personal narrative that accompanies this optional activity is mandatory and is worth a grade. The due date for the 1-page (1 page only), typed paper is Monday/Tuesday, April 7-8. That Tuesday is the TAKS Math Test, so students can drop by any time to turn in their paper after testing, even if they do not have my class that day.

All work for Cycle 5 is due for my class by Wed. 4/9.

Important Dates for Independent Reading Unit 4: FREE CHOICE
Book Checks-M/T 3/31-4/1 (Parent Approval forms due)
Literature Circle # 1 (over the first half of the book)-Friday, April 18
Literature Circle #2 (over the second half of the book)-Friday, May 9
Projects Due MAY 12-13

History:
This week probably has been a week of excitement and possibly disappointment with the notification from the various high schools to which your student applied. If you have any question about high schools, programs or courses, please ask or have your student inquire of us.

On Tuesday night, April 8, at 7:00 P.M., there will be a PTO Meeting at which one of the HISD counselors will speak about high school credits and college. We certainly encourage you to attend.

If your student is in PreAP classes this year, I certainly will encourage you to be sure he/she is enrolled in PreAP classes next year. It is difficult to go from regular classes to PreAP, but the student can move to regular classes from the PreAP.

History: We now are on the Civil War. With the film Glory the students have had a good introduction to horrors of this war. We have been studying the causes leading to the war and the resources of both the North and the South. We have started class discussion on Chapter 15 and will continue with Chapter 16 next week. The map of the Civil War was due this past week.

During all this time, we are reviewing for TAKS and will have an intensive review for a few days prior to the exam. Much of the TAKS exam for history is content so reading their books and reviewing the tests they have taken during the year will help them. I am encouraging the students to keep all the review materials for high school because 50% of the test they take in 10th grade is from this eighth grade course and 35% of the exit exam for high school is from this course.

Science:
All Classes
I have started preparations for the end of course exams, including the IPC Final, the Laying the Foundations Pre-AP exam and the TAKS.Our children have been given study guides that cover every thing they should have learned since 6th grade. This guide is very comprehensive and I have put a great deal of effort to assure that what is in the packet meets all of the state and national standards our kids will be tested over. I have built into my curriculum opportunities for us to work with these guides during the course of the next month, and my goal is to have our kids process the material in the packet at least 7 times.

One opportunity is to simply go over the packet, and then another is to have the students create a lesson plan to teach the class, so on like that. What I will be asking from you is to let your child teach you two lessons a week; these will be 5 minute explanations of the lesson covered in class. I will also ask you to sign a log verifying that your child taught you the weekly lesson and I will take this for a weekly grade.

DUE DATES FOR WORK
This week you should be taught the first two lessons in the series;
Lesson # 1 Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics. Lesson #2 Maps, Rock cycle and minerals.
Please be sure to sign the log stating that you have been taught the lessons.
I have also given the students a home work packet that is separated by objectives and each Friday another objective is due.
Next Friday the sheets from the homework packet relating to objective #1 are due for a major grade.

I am also here every Tuesday after school for tutorials, so if your child is struggling through a lesson please have them stay for help. I can also stay other days if given advance notice.

Math:

All Classes:
Students will take the Math TAKS on Tuesday, April 8th. Please ensure your child gets a good night’s rest on Monday.

Algebra 1:
Students will return to studying algebra with Chapter 8, “Exponents and Exponential Functions”. We will do a final review of TAKS topics on Monday. Tuesday brings the TAKS, and beginning Wednesday, we will cover Chapter 8 material, beginning with where we left off (8.5-8.6). This will complete the chapter. The Chapter 8 test will be next week (the week of April 14th).

Pre-Algebra:
Students will continue working in Chapter 7, “Measuring Area and Volume”. Students have covered this topic in preparation for TAKS, so the plan is to cover the chapter faster than average speed. Students are familiar with area and volume, surface area, both lateral and total, as well as and scale factor changes as the affect area and volume. We will cover sections 7-1 to 7-2 this week.


Foreign Language Department BLOG: See link below

http://pomsfl.wordpress.com