As we all leave for break, I want to take the chance to reiterate the wonderful things going on daily at HTMS.  Laura Reddick’s students have entered art work into a contest sponsored by the National Middle School Association.  I helped cover her class earlier in the week so she could co-teach an activity with Niki Lincoln for social studies.  Her students applied mathematical concepts as they drew tessellations.  I was able to listen to Brenda Graffeo’s students share poems as beatniks in a coffee house.  I sat in on a discussion in Darrell Stovall’s class.  Students read the article from Time and participated in a discussion about it.  Over the past few weeks, all of the 6th graders went to Birmingham Southern to participate in a variety of ecological activities.  Kids came back very excited about what they learned.  Jamey Curlee is kicking off his body systems unit using the movie Supersize Me.  Erin McGuyer’s students taught me some new tricks in PowerPoint as I walked around her classroom.  Sandy Hoffman’s students rotated through different stations during class.  They had choice in working with a partner or alone and to solve a variety of problems. Check the stairwells going upstairs to see great examples of Jan Sterling’s students illustrating solutions to a problem using different strategies.  Go up the stairs in front of the counselors’ offices.  Emily Walsh had students brainstorm using different strategies (drawing a picture, creating a web, using other graphic organizers, or free write.)  Haley Nichols allowed her students to select from a variety of high interest articles.  Students with the same article formed groups and wrote persuasive essays based on their articles.  Anita Dobb’s students celebrated Pi Day (3/14) by doing a variety of math activities that required students to utilize Pi in their solving of problems.  Joy Young’s students used Excel to recreate and fill in their tournament brackets.  They then utilized the program to calculate the winning percentages based on their brackets.  Very high interest way of teaching students the Excel. Ann House’s students created board games to demonstrate their learning.  Tracy Gulledge’s students dissected hearts; I never was able to dissect anything beyond a frog.  Larry Jones’ students had rocket launches to test different principles in physics.  Did you see the article in the Birmingham News the other morning about the cafeteria’s 100 score on the latest health rating? 

Earlier this week, I was privileged to attend the Greater Birmingham Math Partnership Community Math Night.  The leader of the session stressed the importance of math skills and lead the more than 200 people in a variety of exercises that provided practice of multiplication facts without the pain of drill that many of us experienced.  It made me wish that I had such experiences as a student. 

My memory of learning multiplication aren’t all that nice.  I don’t remember why father and I were in the car so much during my third grade year, but I remember him calling out problem after problem until I cried because I had had enough.  What are your memories of learning your multiplication facts?

Amazing things went on at HTMS today!  The 8^th grade science students were spread out over campus discovering things about velocity and speed.  Some were out on the mall shooting rockets made from soft drink bottles.  Others were in the halls building roller coasters.  Mrs. Hambey’s students dissected squids—man does that smell bring back memories of my days in science class.  Mr. Brown’s class participated in a simulation designed to help students learn the workings of the ancient city-states in Greece.  I loved watching each individual “city state” go from claiming all of the land possible alone to forming alliances with other city- states.  We took pictures of the 8^th grade students voted as this year’s who’s who for the yearbook.  The focus of this year’s who’s who was the character education words we study throughout the year. 

Mr. Jones, Mr. Posey, and I are still hard at work with homework remediation.  We appreciate the teachers’ continued efforts to work with students who are not performing as well as we would like.  Unfortunately, there are still too many students not completing work on time, but we are working to help students make better decisions.  We have moved into the next phase of homework remediation.  Students who have been referred before for not having homework automatically go to detention.   Eventually, students will grow tired of sitting in the cafeteria on the hard round seats for two hours after school.  Remember, the media center is open every morning for students who need extra time or extra help to complete homework.  We are here to help each student be successful!