Canned Gratitude...update!

Well, actually my gratitude is fresh and organic...even if it seems to be fragranced with the most natural of fertilizers...

My office is getting very crowded but I can still manage to get to my desk.

Cans upon cans upon cans have crossed the threshold already and we are still early in the drive.  It warms my heart to see the students so genuinely interested in displacing me from my office.  I keep finding additional items in strategic places like my printer when I am trying to troubleshoot reasons things are working around me.  My bookshelf is now a tower of Ramen noodles and almost every level surface in the office is supporting piles of cans, boxes of pasta, and a roll or two of toilet paper.  A package of toothbrushes were placed on my desk yesterday.  I was not sure if it was hint or not, but I chose to believe it was a donation to the drive.  The items are numerous and the variety is wide; initially, students were simply spreading them out over the floor but they were reminded that the goal is max volume capacity not just area!

In addition to the can drive, our CommUnity Club (formerly known as Service Learning Club) is working with all of our advisories to collect toys and clothes for local children in need from both ours and surrounding communities.  Our students are also looking to help support the WA Student Council's efforts to collect school supplies and coats for the students impacted by the fire in an elementary school in Lawrence recently.  We received this information from WA regarding their drive:

-Last Monday the Bruce School in Lawrence had a fire and much of their school's interior was destroyed

-Westford Academy Student Council is running a Coat and School Supplies Drive from Friday November 18-Wednesday November 23 to help replace items lost in the fire 

Some items to donate include (gently used or new):

-Backpacks

-Sweatshirts

-Coats 

-School Supplies 

*We are looking for supplies and clothing for grades 3-8 

Thank you for your support and we hope you have a wonderful holiday!  

We are very proud of how willing our students and their families are to get involved in helping when they recognize a need.

Very soon, the students should be able to express how proud they are of the work they have been doing in their classes as the first term grades will be available soon after the Thanksgiving break.  Grades closed today and after they are completed and verified, they will be made viewable in iParent on Wednesday, November 30 at 2:30PM.

Parent Conferences will be held on Tuesday, December 13th from 7:30AM to 9:30AM and Wednesday, December 14th from 2:00PM to 8:00PM.  There is a 2 ½ hour delayed opening on December 13th and no school on December 14th.  In an effort to accommodate all families interested in attending a conference, we offer a choice between one of two teacher groups: Math/Social Studies or ELA/Science.  Should you wish to schedule a conference we are asking families to sign up for one conference per student online as we have in the past via Sign Up Genius. In addition to one of the team of teachers time-slots, families can also sign-up for a conference with the Integrated Arts and the Foreign Language Teachers if they wish to do so through the Sign Up Genius website.  The website will be open for families to access starting on Wednesday, November 30 at 9:00AM and closing on Thursday, December 8 at 2:00PM.  Changes can be made by calling the office after that time.

These ten-minute check-ins with two of your child's team teachers provide an opportunity for you to share important information, stay informed of your child's progress, and discuss the first trimester report card. Parent conferences are not required, and many parents find a phone call, email or one of our available weekly team conferences meet their needs.  As I shared earlier, our students are well supported both here and at home and these conferences are only one of the many processes that we have in place that help foster the home/school communication which we know to be one the most critical elements for overall student success.  When the adults are all on the same page, the children are more likely to thrive.

I would like to express specific gratitude to the WMSPTO for once again sponsoring our 6th graders visit with Newbery-Medal Award winning author Jack Gantos.  As always, he was entertaining and inspiring.  The students were gripped to his stories and enjoyed hearing about his writing process and how he developed his voice as a writer.

With next week being so short, I will wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving now and do my part to give your inbox a break for a few days!

Chris

Big Ben, Kids...Parliament...update! (posted on SB website 11/10/16)

A number of activities this week made me think about a European Vacation...

8th Graders were singing about the Bubonic Plague (I didn't say all of the activities made me want to take a European Vacation) while others were watching entertaining video clips of the British Parliament in action.  

7th Graders were imagining life under Hammurabi's Laws which took me much further than Europe...but I doubt Clark Griswald would know that.

6th Graders were slapping Spanish vocabulary pictures while others were dancing and acting them out in rapid succession.   

...of course, the students felt like it was a vacation with only three days of classes this week.

Additionally, there is a plan brewing among the Student Council that would result in me having increasingly limited access to my office over the next few weeks.  That doesn't hurt the notion of European Vacations.  The plan as I understand it is to collect enough items for a food drive to fill my entire office and if possible, Mr. McElhinney's, as well.  There is a lot more space in my office, as I remind him regularly, so it will take a lot of items!  From now until December 16th, the Student Council is organizing a can drive for the Westford Food Pantry.  They are looking for donations of food items including instant potatoes, stuffing mixes, soup, spam (not the email variety), cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie filling, and pasta.  Toiletries such as toilet paper, shampoo, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, combs and deodorant (not sure if that is for the drive or just for me and Mr. Mac) are needed, as well.  Any contributions are greatly appreciated!

As we enter the long weekend, I took a moment at the end of the day to share two quotes with the students and remind everyone the importance of not forgetting the reason for tomorrow's Holiday.  

        

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress." - Frederick Douglass

Without the struggle and commitment of our veterans, much of our wonderful progress would simply not have been possible. We must remain steadfast in recognizing the sacrifices so many have made to protect our liberties.

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." -John F. Kennedy

No explanation needed.

I hope your Veteran's Day and the weekend are wonderful!

Chris

Electionem suffragio...update!

In case you haven't heard, there is a big election next Tuesday.  Consider yourself updated. I could not help but find it humorous that the Latin word to vote (suffragio) sounds like suffer.  Regardless of any specific political view, we have all suffered through a barrage of opinions over the last few months.  Enough of that. 8th grade Latin students inspired the title of this update as they were busy creating Propaganda Posters for candidates in Ancient Rome.  Huge posters were plastered in the hall for them to cover with typical Latin phrases they translated while studying local elections in Ancient Rome.  I was pleasantly surprised to stumble into 8th graders creating graffiti on a Friday morning; according to Ms. Latham: This activity is part of the Local Elections unit in which students learn about the various positions one might run for in local elections in ancient Rome, what the duties of these officials were, and the overall election process.  We study the ancient election slogans that were found on the walls of the forum during the excavation of Pompeii and learn many of the various abbreviations that were commonly used in such election 'graffiti.'  The culminating activity of this unit is the mock election with four teams of candidates running for positions.  As a part of this project, students were writing their election slogans on the walls of our 'forum.'  They were required to use the same style of lettering found in Pompeii, three of the newly learned 'Special Verbs, ' and four of the abbreviations they learned from the ancient election graffiti found in Pompeii.   It was awesome! Speaking of studying another part of the world, I received an email from WA today extending a fantastic opportunity to our 8th graders: Colonialism and Conquest in the Pacific Eighth grade students at Stony Brook School have the opportunity to join students from Westford Academy on an educational experience to New Zealand, Australia & Hawaii upon completion of their freshman year at the high school. The trip runs for two weeks beginning at the end of June 2018. Enrollment has begun and over twenty spots have been filled. Interested candidates should contact Westford Academy History teacher Mr. Stephen Scully (sscully@westfordk12.us) for details and pricing. Back to great things happening here, another highlight of the week was watching some of the 6th grade presentations in both Engineering and Theater Arts.  Engineering students were presenting their research on rockets prior to the next phase in which they build their own.  There was a wide variety of information as students created guiding questions to focus their research and had multiple options as to how they wanted to present their information.  They are now working on creating their own rockets which will be launched in the weeks to come.  The students in Theater Arts were tasked with creating marketing commercials for alternative uses of regular house hold objects.  Their work was creative, thoughtful and very entertaining.  In order to develop an alternative use, students needed to examine the initial object closely and determine another possible way to utilize it. Following that, they needed to collaborate on a script that could successfully persuade someone to purchase the object. Finally, I was fortunate to observe a Milky Way Plate Tectonics lab during 7th grade science classes.  Students collected data on the effects various force had on the Milky Way bars as they study plate tectonics.  The gooeyness of the activity created a lot of laughter in addition to the demonstrated will power necessary to not eat the models.  Personally, I was not tempted as I have seen enough sweets lately to last me until...well, Thanksgiving. Have a wonderful weekend! Chris

Let the Games Continue...update! (Posted on SB Website on 10/28)

Gamification is a relatively new buzz word in education, but innovative teachers have been using games as powerful learning tools in the classroom for a long time now.  The difference is the number of people now utilizing video games and or online games to support learning.  Walking through classes this week, I was thrilled to see a healthy balance of the old and new in terms of gamification and in both arenas the adolescent contestants were wonderfully engaged and taking ownership of their learning.  

The first thing I observed was students building confidence in their skill development and practicing the unbelievably difficult skill of communicating in a different language all while playing a wide variety of games. Classic battleship was capsized online to support German language skill development.  Quizlet Live was demonstrated engaging Spanish and German students in team competitions online for energetic vocabulary review.  Memory and Charades in full Spanish immersion had students laughing and eager to participate.  Science classes were full of students accessing Gizmo to virtually race sleds, or playing old fashion card games or organizational games with jelly beans to better understand natural selection and survival of the fittest.  Math classes played a touch free adaptation of Twister and Simon Says to physically represent the various types of relationships between angles while other classes explored Prodigy as players ventured through an imaginary world full of math challenges in order to progress and complete the journey.  One math class organized and executed a snow ball battle of colored paper riddled with math equations that students then needed to solve as part of the recovery process.  Finally, I was able to watch some students successfully solve some printer problems while preparing for their regular Friday News Quiz featuring current events from their own independent research.  It made me wonder if the game wasn't dependent on the printer working if they would have been as enthusiastic about getting it to cooperate with their chromebooks.  That was just one week.

One game we need not play is Mario Cart or any other type of racing game in the driveway of the school.  With the increased traffic on Farmers Way, it can add to the time of dropping off or picking up students.  Please be cautious and drive slowly.  Students can be dropped off or picked up anywhere along the front curb of the building where the student drop off and pick up signs are located.  This decreases the line of waiting vehicles, but it is very important to proceed with caution as individuals are using the crosswalk, as well.  

With the special mid-week edition two days ago, I am keeping this update brief.

Try to stay dry!

Chris