Students are turning in their first genre book worksheets at the end of this week. We spent an hour in the lab this week where I made sure they all knew how to format their papers according to MLA. It was a new things for many of them to open up the paragraph or font boxes to change settings, or to turn on the ruler and make adjustments!

Next week the first book projects are due. Most of the work on reading projects is done at home, but we spent time in class talking about how to take the directions and improve them to go "Beyond Expectations."

We have spent lots of time in the afternoons starting the explorer reports. I'll put the directions right here so you can see what we are doing.

The sixth grade group did their first real math test this week. The tests are going home today. Be sure to look at your child's! The seventh grade grade worked with integers, which they said was fun.

Bryce's character for the vocab test was Gobert, the blob of nothingness. Boy, the kids are taxing my imagination!

Tomorrow everyone is supposed to bring washed and dried rocks to paint for our art project. If no one brings any, we won't be able to do art.

We have enough drivers for October 16! The parents of the following students signed up to drive:

• Bryce
  
• Trevor
  
• Jason
  
• Alex
  
• Madison
  
• Pearl
  
• Shay
  

We want to meet in the gravel parking lot at 9:10 on October 16 and leave ASAP. We will return at the end of the school day. Everyone needs to bring food and drink for the day and nothing else--not even backpacks.

Today we got our first Time for Kids and wrote down the pros and cons of school uniforms. The most surprising thing for the students was that when Vinland opened there were very poor sections of Poulsbo that were part of the Vinland school. It was also surprising that Mrs. Kragen was at Vinland when it opened, and she helped make the decision about uniforms!

We started Lit Groups this week. There are different groups for each genre book that students are reading: Hatchet, Julie of the Wolves, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Sounder, Call It Courage, and Night of the Twisters.

The vocab test stories are fun, but memorizing the definitions can take a long time--like a week. Andrew strongly recommends using Quizlet to study the words. Mrs. Kragen says to remember that this was just the second week. People are doing really well for this early in the year. Jada pointed out the characters for the first two stories were pretty normal--Bob the sparkly pigeon-turtle and Sarah the evil sparkly watermelon.

In math the 6th grade group is almost done with chapter one. We will have our first test next week. Quizzes are going home today. They need to be fixed to 100%, signed by a parent, and returned tomorrow. The 7th grade group is doing cool and complicated work with variables.

After doing a proverbs project for The Phantom Tollbooth together, students have been working together on group projects for The Phantom Tollbooth. Doing projects together first gives them a better idea of how to do a good job when they go on to do individual projects later.

We've been learning about the three explorers Columbus, Cortes, and Magellan. Mrs. Kragen drew pictures over time as she talked to go along with what she was saying. We sat up close because brain research says we will learn more if we are up close.

We had our first week in math. Our lesson in sixth grade math today was on exponents. We found out that numbers to the second power were squared and numbers to the third power were cubed because of geometry--a number times itself makes a square and times itself again makes a cube. After all, squares have two sides or dimensions and cubes have three. 

Also, ten to the power of any number the answer will have the same number of zeroes as the exponent: 10 to the sixth power is 1 and six zeroes. 

We did some experimenting to prove the base number and its exponent are NOT commutative. 

The seventh grade math group was doing the order of operations using both brackets and parentheses.

Mrs. Kragen announced today that she is planning a field trip on October 16 to the Keyport Museum to work on Remote Operated Vehicles. We have a few drivers but she needs more!

We've had a full week of school, and here are the highlights, according to the students in the class:

• the grammar lesson about prepositions that used two cups, some water, and a knife (ask for details)
• the grammar lesson about transitive and intransitive verbs using a Koosh ball, pine cones, and lying in the grass (ask for details)
• the art lesson where everyone traced their bodies and wrote and/or drew pictures inside to reveal themselves
• the first vocab test--the story especially
• the Jump In Jump Out ice breaker activity
• recess and PE, of course
• smelling real cinnamon (the bark)
• the social studies story Why Did They Take the Trek?
• the discovery of Greenland, Newfoundland, and Vinland ("Wineland") so long ago that we still know something about even though it was forgotten for so long