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Welcome to a fun and exciting year in music class! Our first liturgy with Bishop Gries was a wonderful celebration as a school community. Despite only being in school two weeks, the students did an amazing job singing and participating in the mass! We will continue learning new songs for mass throughout the year in addition to classroom learning. Throughout all grade levels, music classes will focus on singing, musical concepts such as beat, rhythm, dynamics and tempo. We will be using various pitched and unpitched percussion instruments as well as body percussion. Throughout the year, classes will be held five days in a row one week a month. I am looking forward to g wonderful, musical year!

Students are learning to work interdependently in STREAM 1! This means that many of our projects and activities have had a focus on teamwork and collaboration. Kindergarten listened to the story Bonaparte Falls Apart by Margery Cuyler. In the story Bonaparte’s friends help him to solve a problem. His friends come up with many different ideas to help find a solution. Not all of the ideas work. We learned that it is important to try many ideas when attempting to solve a problem. Kindergarten also learned about symmetry and created their own symmetrical skeletons using playdoh and Q-Tips! First and Second Grade students read the book Press Here by Herve Tullet. This surprising book helped students to explore the concepts of action and reaction. We learned that where there are a series of actions and reactions, we have a chain reaction. Students then used basic classroom materials to create their own series of chain reactions! Third and Fourth Grade students participated in a STEM Quest Escape Room Challenge. They worked in teams to solve a variety of standards based challenges in math & language arts. They proved to be *SMARTIES* as all four classes were able to complete the quest! Fifth Grade students practiced their collaboration skills as well as their use of the engineering and design process in the newspaper basketball tower challenge. Students worked in teams to create a tower using only newspaper and masking tape that would hold the weight of a basketball. The tower must be stable and a height of at least 12 inches. All teams were successful and many teams challenged themselves beyond the 12 inch requirement reaching heights of 20 inches and beyond! Sixth, Seventh and Eighth grade students had to use collaboration and were required to think outside the box in the nail balance challenge. Students were challenged to see how many nails they could balance on the head of one nail. The nails could touch each other but no part of the wood block. Many students hypothesized that the teams would only be able to balance one or two nails. In the end, many groups were successful in balancing between 12 and 32 nails!! In between our larger group activities the students have been participating in smaller challenges that focus on a specific Habit of Mind. Classrooms have begun sharing their knowledge and expertise on these Habits of Mind. Look for the student created posters that will begin to be displayed in the hallway across from the office!

Faith Corner; News from the Music Room

As we look back to 2017, St. Benedict's second graders had so much fun preparing for Christmas. We celebrated by enjoying time together as a class, drinking hot chocolate and reflecting on the year. After a long break, we are excited to be back at school again. In this New Year we will begin thinking of New Year’s resolutions and asking God to help us make good choices in our daily lives. In Math class, we are continuing to work with double digit addition with the concept of regrouping. During this time, practicing our math facts has been a huge focus in school and at home. In Social Studies class, students are enjoying reading the adventures of Flat Stanley as he travels to many different states. We will continue our study of maps and how to read them. In Language Arts, we are focusing on reading fluency by starting individual poetry binders. We have been enjoying acting out the poems, illustrating, and even writing our own poems. We are excited to see what God has planned for us as we dive into the 3rd quarter of school.

Winter MAP Testing: Reading 1/11/2018 Math 1/18/2018

In this week's Wednesday folder will be your child's first round of MAP testing scores. Please look for those results. Thank you!