January 26 - January 30

Well, we're heading into the end of a grading period, which means that students will be finishing up projects and reports that need to be completed and we'll be extra busy during study hall time helping students complete those assignments.

Mr. Pollnow's science class will be in where they will be creating a website using Wix. Their website will relate to one of the biomes of the world.

The teacher teams had their Battle of the Book competition on Friday after school.  These 16 teachers have volunteered to read the 20 books that the students read for the competition and give up their time to compete against each other.  Our top two teacher teams will compete against each other during a scheduled homeroom time during the first week in February, then the winning teacher team will compete against the winning student team.  The students are looking forward to watching the teachers compete against each other.

January 19 - January 23

I'm excited to be working with Mrs. Nowack's class this week!  They will be creating comics using the web tool Pixton where they will be including vocabulary words and images that relate to a story about rocks and minerals. Mrs. Nowack's class will also be doing rock identification while in the library.  They will be searching a variety of tools and following clues to figure out what type of rock they have.

Mrs. Murphy's Spanish classes will be in working on an interactive video as well as getting an introduction on how to use the program Poster My Wall for their Los Gustos project that they will be working on.

January 12 - 16

This week the library is booked up with students taking their STAR tests in both language arts and math.   Mrs. Turk's class will also be coming in to check out independent novels.  This will give the students opportunity to explore different novels that they may be interested in and make a final choice.

Last week Mrs. Honn's class finished up their presentations on Native American tribes in Wisconsin, a few examples are below.

https://www.movenote.com/v/6f2iGDxMqP89x

https://www.movenote.com/v/7Lgb588GcBFjI

https://www.movenote.com/v/RqDJeZpmgjvAN

The students did an excellent researching and creating their presentations during the week.

Battle of the Books 2014-2015

Battle of the Books is a school reading competition where students create teams of four and read a combined twenty books.  After they are done reading the books they take part in head-to-head book battles.  This year we have about 75 student participants and 16 staff participants.  A short video of the books that they are reading is below.

The staff are getting ready to battle the other staff teams near the end of the month.  The winning teacher team will have the opportunity to challenge the winning student team in February.  The students will have their head-to-head battle on Friday, February 13th where the winning team for Park View will be crowned. The winning team will then compete against 154 other middle schools in the state of Wisconsin.

Stay tuned there I'll be posting more on Battle of the Books in the near future.

Learning the Green Screen

One of the best things about middle school students is that they are always ready to try something new and to learn.  The Mustang Mall, our school store was in need of some commercials to put on our morning news show, so after asking a few students I found a group who was willing to make the video and experiment with using our green screen.  Below is the ad for coloring pencils that they made....a fantastic job!

January 5 - January 9

Well, winter break is over, the students are back and school, and the weather is cold!  This week all the 8th grade students will be coming to the library over the course of three days to use the program Wisconsin Careers with counselor Mr. Langenfeld.  It's hard to believe, but the 8th graders will be registering for high school courses soon.  The Wisconsin Careers program allows the students the opportunity to view their strengths and weakness and take a look at what careers they may be interested in the future as well as what courses they may need to take in high school.

The rest of the week Mrs. Honn's 7th grade social studies class will be in the library working on researching the different Native American tribes in Wisconsin and then creating a presentation using the google app Movenote.