And so another year draws to a close. We have traveled through time to Mesopotamia, Colonial America, and Colorado’s past. We have explored the depths of the ocean, and the rainforests and deserts of Central and South America. We have researched mammals and experimented with simple machines. Over the course of this year we have grown and flourished, overcome obstacles, faced conflicts and speed bumps, and victoriously made it to the end! This has been another great year in Middle Kids. We have enjoyed getting to know your children and watching their successes.

For those of you returning next year, we will see you soon. For those of you who will no longer be with us, we wish you nothing but the best in your future endeavors.

This week we have two very important Rivendell events.  On Thursday we have the Spring Program.  This is a wonderful celebration of our year and the time when our graduating 5th graders bid farewell to Rivendell in the speeches they give during this program.  It takes place at Rocky Mountain High School at 6pm.  Please have your kids there by 5:50 so that you have time to help them find their teacher and to find yourself a good seat.  We hope you can make it.  And on Friday we have Fun Run.  The Middle Kids will be running at 10:20 until 10:50.  We hope you can come to cheer us on.  We also hope it isn’t raining!

Next week the 3rd graders will be heading up to Sky Ranch.  The 2nd graders will combine classes in Bryce’s room.  Lori Wold will be their teacher for Monday and Tuesday.  The 3rd graders need to be at school by 8:30 on Monday ready to head up to Sky Ranch.  Suzanne and Bryce will leave early so that we have time to get sleeping arrangements sorted for the kids be there to greet everyone.  It looks like a rainy week here this week so there could be lots of snow up at Sky Ranch.  Please be sure to pack appropriately.  We should get an update on weather conditions this week.  A behavior contract for Sky Ranch is going home in Homework Folders.  Please read and sign it and return it with all Sky Ranch paperwork this week.

We continue to be super busy in the classroom.  We are trying to meet end of year math goals, complete our reading workshop books or find a new one that can be finished in three weeks, and finish our writing workshop stories.  End- of-year portfolios are well underway.  We really are rapidly approaching the end of the year!

This week will be another busy one. In Writer’s Workshop we have started writing our last story of the year. This time the kids will practice writing in a shorter period of time. The prewriting, rough draft, revision and final copy will all be completed within the next few weeks. We will also be celebrating the awesome poetry we have been writing over the past few weeks in our Middle Kids’ Poetry Slam this Wednesday.

In topic work we are learning some important facts about Colorado and will be taking a closer look at the history of Fort Collins. The kids will choose some important events in our history to add to their own Fort Collins timeline.

The 3rd graders will be testing each morning at 8:40am. The test will last about 1 ½ hour and then the rest of the day will be a regular day. The 2nd graders will have normal work sessions during this time. We will not have official homework this week; our 3rd graders can have a relaxing evening to help them be ready for tests in the morning. However, kids who are in a novel study group will need to read the appropriate chapters for this week’s discussion. Also, kids who are learning multiplication facts should keep practicing them.

Our Spring Program is next week, Thursday May 7th at Rocky Mountain High School. This begins at 6pm and is a great time to celebrate another fabulous school year. Fun Run is the next day. Middle Kids will run 10:20-10:50. Please be sure to get a few sponsors for this fun event. The Middle Kids classes will be meeting tomorrow to decide on some fun incentives for raising money during this fundraiser. These incentives will be based on the total amount raised by each class. Keep in mind that all money raised will be used to help make the Commons (a room shared by all of us!) and our library a better place.We have extra sponsor sheets in the office if you need one.

The final countdown begins: only five weeks to go, and a very busy five weeks these will be! We have begun our last unit of the year which is Colorado history. We will focus on Fort Collins, but will also learn a little about the rest of the state and the various reasons why people moved to this region.

In Writer’s Workshop we will start our last narrative of the year. The kids will plan a story with a strong beginning, a good problem and a satisfying ending. We will be learning how to use dialogue correctly and how to make our sentences more interesting with varied beginnings and different conjunctions. This story will be a short one that we will finish and share with peers before the end of the year.

We have many upcoming events:

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is what we call Promotion Day at Rivendell. It is when children who are moving up a level next year get to spend half the day in higher-level classroom. Our third graders will spend half of tomorrow in either Jessica’s or Karen and Megan’s class. They should report to middle kids classrooms in the morning when they arrive, as usual.

On Thursday at 7:30am we have a Sky Ranch meeting. This is for all 3rd graders and their parents. We will talk about sleeping arrangements, activities, supplies needed and other important things. Please plan on attending this meeting.

On Friday we have our field trip to the Downtown Aquarium in Denver. We will leave at around 8:50 and will back at school by 3:00. Please send a sack lunch with your child. We are very excited and we know a good time will be had by all.

On Saturday we are having our Spring Clean-up starting at 9am. We will be sprucing up the inside and outside of our building. If you have a little time to spare, please consider stopping by to help out for awhile.

Next week 3rd graders will begin the Iowa test of Basic Skills. This will take place Monday-Friday for a couple of hours each morning. Please be on time to school and try not to schedule any appointments in the mornings next week. These tests are quite hard to make up if one is missed. The 2nd graders will have a regular morning and there will be no homework for all middle kids the week of testing.

This week the Middle Kids try our hand at writing poetry.  We will learn about personification while we write our first poem and then experiment with some free form poems. Our poetry writing mini-unit will culminate with our very own poetry slam. It should be a lot of fun.

In topic work each student will be researching a mammal. We will try to do some of the research here at school, but some will need to be done for homework.  Next week we will be using this research to combine creative and factual writing as the kids write from the point of view of their mammal.

This week and next will be a short week because of parent/teacher conferences. We look forward to this time when we can share all the growth and progress your child has made this year and discuss goals and hopes for the rest of the year.

This time of year is so busy so here are some dates for you to add to your calendars:

April 9th-17th Scholastic Book Fair

April 15th- Class Picture Day

April 21st – Promotion Day.  This is when 3rd graders will spend a morning in Older Kids so they can get a taste of what to expect next year

April 23rd – Sky Ranch meeting at 7:30am for 3rd graders and their parents

April 24th Field trip to Denver Aquarium

April 27th-May 1st IOWA Test of Basic Skills for 3rd graders

Happy last few days of March! March certainly is going “out like a lamb” this year! However, it looks like we may not be finished with our jeans and jackets yet. The end of this week looks a bit unstable!

Middle kids have wrapped up our unit on Colonial America and the Revolution. We talked about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights last week, and we wrote our own “Class Bill of Rights.” We definitely had some interesting discussions about the differences between our “rights” and our “privileges”! We will be moving on this week to a new unit on Mammals.

Our annual Egg Drop event last Thursday was a huge success. The weather ended up cooperating, and it was so much fun to watch those creative containers with their precious cargo dropping from the sky! We had many success stories, and many others who will need to rethink their design for next year. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining and educational experience for these budding scientists (and their parents, of course!)

In writing this week we will move from opinion writing to persuasive writing. Today we talked about the difference, and read them some examples of good, persuasive writing. In the next few days the kids will be writing a persuasive paragraph (or paragraphs) on the topic of “homework or no homework?” We wanted to choose a topic that they would all have strong feelings about! Whether they choose homework or no homework, they will need to provide good supporting reasons for their choice. And, they will try to persuade others to feel the way they do.

If you have not signed up for a parent teacher conference yet, please do so. Sign up sheets are posted outside the classroom door. Also, if you have not returned your permission slip for the aquarium, please try to get it to us in the next couple of days. We have plenty of people who have volunteered to chaperon our trip (thanks, by the way!), so we will have to draw names and let you know by the end of the week who will be coming along.

We have a couple of requests from the office this week:

Advertising Opportunity for Local Businesses–Support healthy kids at Rivendell School!
Have your company logo featured on our Fun Run 2015 water bottles or t-shirts! To be a sponsor, companies may donate from $100 up to $500. If you are interested, please contact Jenda in the front office by Wednesday, April 1st.

Colonial Day Pie Social:
Help us celebrate Colonial Day by donating a pie for our Pie Social! We need 13 regular pies and 2 gluten-free. The pies MUST be store-bought because of health code regulations. If you can donate a pie for April 2, please let the Front Office staff know.

So here we are in the final stretch of the school year! It’s hard to believe we only have 9 weeks of school left and still so much to teach and learn. We hope you all had a relaxing, fun break and are ready for this busy time of school.

We will be finishing up our unit on the American Revolution with a brief study of some of the battles, focusing on the long winter at Valley Forge and will end this unit with a look at our Constitution. The students will also have a recitation on a major person from this period of history. Please look in the homework folder for more information about this.

On Thursday we have our annual Egg Drop. Kids are encouraged to create a container to protect a raw egg when dropped from the top of a fire engine ladder. The event will take place at 2:30pm so please stop by for the fun.

On April 24th the Middle Kids will be taking a field trip to the Denver Aquarium. We will travel by chartered bus and spend most of the day down there. Since we have small classes this year, we will only need 2 chaperones plus teachers from each class. We have found that this gives us perfect sized groups where the kids can enjoy each other’s company and still be a manageable size for the adult in charge. If many parents offer to chaperone, we will need to draw names. We are including a permission slip in the homework folder. Please complete this and send in the $10.00 as soon as possible. We would like to figure out our chaperones by the end of March.

** Please remember to come in and sign up for a time for a spring conference. Sign-up sheets are posted outside the classrooms.

King George III of England sent an email this morning ordering new taxes to be paid by Middle Kids. The students had to pay a variety of taxes for the use of such items as paper, pencils, restrooms, and water, as well as anything teachers considered “intolerable” behavior (such as shouting out, not listening to instructions, or complaining). They even had to quarter (share their desk with) another student for part of the day. For all of you American history buffs, you may notice that this activity was meant to simulate the taxation without representation faced by the colonists before the American Revolution. While the students enjoyed this unique experience, many of them did feel the injustice and arbitrary nature of this taxation. As you can see, this week we will be learning more about the events that lead to the Revolutionary War.

This week in literacy we will focus our attention on writing a proper summary of a book. The students are learning a technique called the 5-finger summary. The 5 fingers are: somebody, wanted, but, so, then. Writing a summary can be tricky, so it is a skill that we teach and review each year.

The Rivendell Science Fair is up and running. When you have a chance this week, please stop in and take a look. If you have time and are willing, please feel free to fill out an evaluation on a project or two. The forms are available as you walk in the front door.

Remember that there is no school this Friday, and that next week is spring break. We hope you all have a wonderful time with your families.

**Special note for kids who were in the Because of Winn-Dixie book group: Don’t forget to complete your end-of-book assignment and turn it in by Thursday. The next book study group will start after spring break. We will let you know who is in that group when we return.

The Middle kids are learning all about life in Colonial America. Our students enjoyed writing in journals as if they were traveling to the New World in the early 1600s. They faced a great deal of hardship, including suffering through many storms on the ship, eating stale, rotten food and drinking beer! We will now now explore life in the colonies as our students experience school at that time and move on to a study of the original thirteen colonies. As we move through this unit the students are considering our essential question which asks how historical events influence our lives today.

In writing workshop we will begin a unit on opinion and persuasive writing. The middle kids have a lot to say so this is a great opportunity for them to be heard. They will learn how to state their opinion and support it with good reasons. We will then move onto using their voice to create a persuasive paragraph. In reader’s workshop we will be writing book reviews of some of our favorite books as we continue to work on reading more fluently and with deeper understanding of the story and characters. For those students in our book study group, this will be our last week. These readers will have a little bit of extra homework, but they will have two weeks to complete it. We will talk to them more about this tomorrow at book group.

On Friday Middle Kids will be presenting their Science Share projects. Please make sure the yellow sheets are filled out completely by then. Students will tell about their experiment, what happened and what they learned. We do not want them to read everything on their sheets, so its a great idea to help your child practice his/her presentation. Some kids bring in photos of the experiment or even the experiment itself if it’s easy to do that. If your child has created a display board for the Science Fair, he/she can bring in that to share. We are excited to see all the cool experiments.