The Midway Mark!

February 02, 2024

It's hard to believe, but the second quarter is over. In other words, we are at the midway mark of the school year! This also means that student report cards have been posted in PowerSchool. If you are having trouble viewing them please reach out. If the STAR assessments are indicative of anything, we have seen plenty of growth academically this year!

If you are an 8th-grade parent, you should have received an email from me this afternoon but the grade-specific lists are sometimes flawed so I am sharing similar information here. Thomas Prince's 8th grade was chosen to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I can only imagine they want us to help bring the National average up :) Pertinent information can be found in the letter in our electronic folder.

The new month brings a new Reading Challenge! Thank you Mrs. Dolat for continuing this tradition! This month's prompts are particularly fun: Read a story about friendship, a book from the library, and a book about someone different from you. You can find the flyer and response form in the electronic folder. For the month of January, we had 73 participants that read a collective 229 books! Kindergarten did an amazing job and accounted for 27 of the students who participated. Go Kindergarten!

It's important to remember that we are a STEAM school and every week there is something going on that illustrates this. It's impossible to share everything. However, this week, the 6th-grade students helped me by writing below. Their teachers gave them a STEAM challenge to build a snowman and they were forced to do some problem-solving as it was less than optimal snow for this purpose. See what the kids thought and a few examples of their work below:

Our Snowman Challenge was to build a snowman that was the mean (average) of all of the people in our group, and it had to be three snowballs tall. We were only allowed a short one hour! Our groups could be up to six people, and we were allowed to choose our groups. After that we had to choose our theme for our snowman. The themes included, Sports, Picasso, British Man, Summer, Cowgirl Barbie, Melting, Survival, and Fairy Princess. Unfortunately, the snow was not cooperating with us and it was very crumbley. We ended up taking snow from piles that were plowed, and stuffing the cracks with the crumbley snow. Luckily, our teachers dropped the three snowball rule and the height rule. We were allowed to bring materials from home, so it was interesting to see what people brought. The turnout was a success! All of them were so creative, and unique! Thank you to our amazing teachers for letting us have such an exciting time!

-Sixth Graders