With only 20 days left in the school year, it is time to display the word cloud banner with names of all our 8th grade students. Each year I see groups of students gathered around determined to find their name. I hear our students in 6th and 7th grade talking about how much they will miss these 8th graders. Teachers give hugs to students who will be leaving us and help to reminisce about the good times here at WJMS. We are proud of your accomplishments and we celebrate your advancement to a new chapter in your lives. Congratulations WJMS class of 2017….you will be missed!
The kids(and the adults too) have enjoyed figuring out our latest contest on the bulletin board outside the media center. There are twelve book titles for the contest written using emojis only! Can you figure out all of them?
As a school goal, this year we are challenging our students to earn 20,000 Accelerated Reader points. If we reach our goal, volunteer faculty will participate in a Color Run. While ours will be more of a 25 yard dash instead of a 5K, we think the kids will love it. Students have enjoyed our end of the year Accelerated Reader events through the years that I am sure they will have no problem reaching our goal this year. I’m looking for faculty volunteers so please let me know if you are willing to participate.
Today begins the 2016-2017 school year for WJMS. To welcome students back to school, I’ve created a “Meet Our Cast” bulletin board. The gold stars have the names of all faculty and staff written on them so our new students may familiarize themselves with the adults in the building. I hope everyone has a great first day and a wonderful school year.
With only 27 days left in the school year, it is time to display the word cloud banner with names of all our 8th grade students. Each year I see groups of students gathered around determined to find their name. I hear our students in 6th and 7th grade talking about how much they will miss these 8th graders. Teachers give hugs to students who will be leaving us and help to reminisce about the good times here at WJMS. We are proud of your accomplishments and we celebrate your advancement to a new chapter in your lives. Congratulations WJMS class of 2016….you will be missed!
We celebrated Teen Tech Week March 7th through 11th with a new display this year. Ms. Pacman made her debut as sticky-note art. Kids thought it was great and were excited about trying out some others. Students could also play our version of Angry Birds. We had six bad piggies on a pyramid of boxes. Students could throw a ball at the pyramid to try to knock down all bad piggies. The media center also showcased a Technology Museum filled with old video controllers, typewriters, cameras, 8-track tape players and more. In addition, we went low-tech during the week. Students were able to make popsicle stick bows and used q-tips as arrows. They were able to make these fly up to 25 feet!
Sixteen-year-old Tess Kendrick has spent her entire life on her grandfather’s ranch. But when her estranged sister Ivy uproots her to D.C., Tess is thrown into a world that revolves around politics and power. She also starts at Hardwicke Academy, the D.C. school for the children of the rich and powerful, where she unwittingly becomes a fixer for the high school set, fixing teens’ problems the way her sister fixes their parents’ problems.
And when a conspiracy surfaces that involves the family member of one of Tess’s classmates, love triangles and unbelievable family secrets come to light and life gets even more interesting—and complicated—for Tess.
Avatar meets The Terminator in this thrilling cyber-tech adventure
Crippled by muscular dystrophy, Adam spends his days playing virtual reality games, until a dangerously advanced artificial intelligence program that can control other machines tries to kill him.
Created by Adam’s father, Sigma has escaped its cyber prison and is threatening world domination. In order to stop Sigma, Adam and five other terminally ill teens sacrifice their bodies and upload their minds into weaponized robots. Together, The Six must learn how to manipulate their new mechanical forms—and prepare for epic combat—before Sigma destroys humanity.
from https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Six.html?id=z7XprQEACAAJ&hl=en
We are enjoying our most recent addition to our Christmas decorations in the library…courtesy of Pinterest. 🙂 I used $1 store beach balls covered with plastic table cloths. The tops are solo cups covered with aluminum foil. The rings at the top were made from paper clips. This one made a huge impact and we only spent $12!
This year in addition to our Halloween decorations, I decided to create a mystery display to go along with them. I showcased some of our favorite mysteries in the library with footprints to lead students to the media center where they can check them out.
At our first meeting, I created activities for us to get to know one another better so that we are more comfortable sharing thoughts during our book discussions. We started with the Wonderball Know It All. For this activity, the group created a circle. Students took turns throwing a beach ball with numbers on it to each other. When they caught it, they called out the number nearest their right thumb. I read out the corresponding question to them to answer. I was able to gather some great information on the personality of the kids on questions such as, “What is your biggest phobia?”, “On a scale of 1-10, how hip are you?”, and “What is something you couldn’t live without?”. Another activity was to create a Google Drawing of themselves using the effects on Photofunia.com to reflect their personality. Below are some of the results. I think they were very creative and did a great job! I’m looking forward to a great year with a very unique group of Book Club members.
With over 10,000 fiction books to choose from, it’s sometimes overwhelming for students to find just the right book. To make this process easier, I’ve divided the fiction section by genre. Our books are divided into Sports Fiction, Graphic Novels, Realistic Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Adventure, and Fantasy genres. To figure out which genre best matches a student, I developed a short quiz to help narrow down areas of interest. The Fiction Genre Quiz has no scientific basis; it’s just for fun. Hopefully it will give students a starting place when searching for a good book. Huge thanks to http://www.readerpants.net for sharing her quiz so I could edit with our genres.
Join us in the media center this Friday for activities supporting Georgia STEM Day! I’ve got classes scheduled all day for balloon rockets, the spaghetti tower challenge, floating ping pong balls, the airplane distance and accuracy challenge, hovercrafts, the tin foil boat challenge, and much more.
Last week, we placed the word cloud banner with names of all our 8th grade students on the wall outside the media center. Each year I see groups of students gathered around determined to find their name. I hear our students in 6th and 7th grade talking about how much they will miss these 8th graders. Teachers give hugs to students who will be leaving us and help to reminisce about the good times here at WJMS. We are proud of your accomplishments and celebrate your advancement to a new chapter in your lives. Congratulations WJMS class of 2015….you will be missed!
Celebrating Red Ribbon Week with a new door decoration for our school contest.
We celebrated Teen Tech Week March 7th through 11th with a new display this year. Ms. Pacman made her debut as sticky-note art. Kids thought it was great and were excited about trying out some others. Students could also play our version of Angry Birds. We had six bad piggies on a pyramid of boxes. Students could throw a ball at the pyramid to try to knock down all bad piggies. The media center also showcased a Technology Museum filled with old video controllers, typewriters, cameras, 8-track tape players and more. In addition, we went low-tech during the week. Students were able to make popsicle stick bows and used q-tips as arrows. They were able to make these fly up to 25 feet!
Sixteen-year-old Tess Kendrick has spent her entire life on her grandfather’s ranch. But when her estranged sister Ivy uproots her to D.C., Tess is thrown into a world that revolves around politics and power. She also starts at Hardwicke Academy, the D.C. school for the children of the rich and powerful, where she unwittingly becomes a fixer for the high school set, fixing teens’ problems the way her sister fixes their parents’ problems.
Life in the Library 