**UPDATED-7th Grade** First Full Week: August 15-19

Hello again!

I hope you all had a nice weekend, recharged your batteries, and are ready for our first full week of the 2011-2012 school year!!

CLASSROOM POLICY NOTE:
Parents, hopefully you have read about this on the syllabus I sent home with your students (you were supposed to sign it; it is due for all students tomorrow, Monday August 15), but I wanted to address it on the blog, as well.

Due to a large amount of missing and late work last year, I have decided to implement a new policy I call "Homework Think Sheets." Under this policy, each time an assignment is due in my class, I have required all students to have something to turn in; either the completed assignment (ideally) or one of my Homework Think Sheets (shown below-click on the image to make it larger):
As you can see, students without completed work are required to name the assignment, the reason why they don't have it completed, and give a date when they plan to turn it in. By taking the time to fill out this piece of paper, students will then be given a second chance to turn in the assignment for reduced points. Failure to turn in this "Think Sheet" will result in a grade of Ø on the assignment. If any assignment is not turned in within two days of filling out the "Think Sheet," I will be contacting parents about the situation.

Please note: This policy does not excuse students from doing their work; rather, it is a concrete way for me to keep track of students' late and missing work, and to allow students to provide feedback on why they are not completing their work. Hopefully this will be an excellent data tool which can be used to track student behavior, as well as for me to modify my assignments to student needs and interests.

If you have any questions about this policy, please feel free to e-mail me at school. :)

Now, for this week's activities:

**OPEN HOUSE! Come meet me and the other Discovery School teachers on Thursday, August 18th, from 7:30-9:00 AM!!**

6th Grade: This week we will continue looking at maps, and will do activities on the types of maps, parts of a map, geographic features, and map grids. All of these activities will be started in class, but some may require extra time to finish at home.
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7th grade: We will continue studying maps this week by looking at the various map projections used by cartographers (map makers). **UPDATED** The first quiz of 7th grade will be sent home as a take-home exam on Friday, August 19. There will be no review questions on the blog, as this will be a take-home exam. **UPDATED**
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8th grade: Family will continue to be our theme this week; hopefully each 8th grade student spent time this weekend interviewing their families for their family history project...that information and the family tree will be due Tuesday, and we will be working on our presentations, which will be given on Thursday and Friday.
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9th grade: We will be finishing up our short Renaissance and Reformation review on Monday, and then moving on to the Age of Exploration/Discovery on Tuesday...we'll start out with an overview video and then focus more deeply on the first two countries to explore...can you guess which ones they were?!
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Here's to another great week at Discovery School!

KF