We had a fun adventure to the top of Black Butte last week. The students worked hard and showed great perseverance on our mission to the top. There was a cold wind to greet us on the summit but spirits stayed positive as we had a quick lunch and then cruised back to school. Thanks everyone for keeping this annual tradition alive. 

 I was away from school to start this week as I attended the Wide Open Spaces conference with other small rural school leaders from across the state. Big thanks to the staff at BBS for covering things while I was away. I got back in time for our monthly school board meeting yesterday. One item I was pleased to present was the results from state testing last spring. BBS continues to far exceed state averages in both math and language arts. This past year we had 79% of our students show proficiency in language arts (state average was 43%) and 53% were proficient in math (state average was 34%). Great job to all our students for their hard work last year. 

 Bull Trout Basin:

• Today I revealed to the kids our Halloween plans. We are going to give students a chance to get in their costumes during the Bull Trout Basin on Wed 10/28. Tammy and I have a few fun activities to lead with the kids. We will maintain the morning of 10/28 as a normal academic block so please send kids to school in their normal clothes and they will have time to change into costumes for the afternoon. Hopefully this way we can still be focused in the morning and have some Halloween fun in the afternoon. 
• Students participated in the Fire Busters program during Basin block today and learned a variety of topics: when to call 9-1-1, e-bike safety, fire alarms, and how to have a family evacuation plan. Ask your child what they learned from this program. 

Conferences: Keep an eye out for an email from either your classroom teacher or myself about scheduling a time for parent teacher conferences later this month. We want to meet with each student/family for about 30 minutes. This is a great time to discuss how the year has started off, go over goals for the year, and ask any questions you have about your child’s classroom. We look forward to seeing you then.

After learning about how to make characters using our voice, movement, facial expressions we put all those skills together to create silly characters with costumes! Next Monday we will be reading through our scripts and starting to work on our performance. More to come about that soon!

Our next OBOB meeting is afterschool on October 22nd 3:15-4:15. Thanks to Maureen for volunteering to help out! If you’d like to volunteer at a future OBOB meeting, sign up here. 

The goal is for your kiddos to have one book read (or a good start!) and to have the authors and book titles memorized (or close!) by October 22nd.  We will be discussing the books the kids are reading, doing a practice battle based on the authors/book titles, and assigning new books to read. 

We heard back from the Jefferson County Cup that we will be able to take our two teams to that tournament on Friday February 19th! We are so excited that all of our students will be able to participate in a tournament!

We will be announcing our teams at our November 19th meeting. Our goal is to balance our two teams out with grade levels and reading abilities, so that both are competitive with each other and the other schools. 

Here’s some links to some other helpful resources:

• September meeting slideshow 
• author name pronunciation guide
• book/author list
• slideshow with book descriptions
• OBOB website
• OBOB Dog (practice questions)
• OBOB official rules

After a great (and cold and windy!) trip up Black Butte on Friday, the school week has been busy and fun.

In Humanities, Blue Bay students have been learning about the origins of Christianity from a historical lens, and getting into the Zearn Math routine.

Science has been the biggest focus this week as students are working on their Ecosystem Job Fair projects: doing research, making drafts, and designing their posters. At the end of the day tomorrow they will present their posters to the younger BBS students who will be involved in the Job Fair as participants. 

Homework: Tonight, students need to complete their poster (they have an assignment sheet with the requirements), and practice presenting it to their family. Poster presentations should be about 2 minutes in duration. Other homework includes studying their spelling words for this week (20 contractions) for their test tomorrow, and continuing their nightly reading in Scat by Carl Hiaasen (finish book by Monday).

We are really hitting our stride and students are in the rhythm! This rhythm can either be exciting for students because they know what to do or it can be a time when the “honeymoon” stage of the start of the year can wear off. If your student is showing signs of fatigue or sharing frustration about school, please let me know. I will do the same to share any signs with you. 

Conference sign-ups will be sent out soon. Please remember this 30-minute meeting time is a time for us to connect and for your student to show off their work. It can be challenging for students to have parents at school because often students are using school as a place to figure out who they are away from home and parents, which can be very different from who they are at home (at least in their minds). When we are all sitting together looking at them, it is a lot for them to be both at once. We will talk about this at school. It can be good for them to know that it is OK to be trying on different versions of themselves in different settings. Also please know I am flexible with meeting times. Some families like to enjoy the 2 extra days off school and coming back to school one of those days doesn’t fit into their schedule. I am happy to meet after school the days before or after conferences if that works better for your family.  

Literacy

• Still meeting more sound animals and working on writing skills, from letter formation to writing full sentences with detail.
• Ask 2nd grade students what part of fluency they are working on. Ask K-1 students about vowel sounds. 

Math

• One to one counting and number writing, addition and subtraction on number lines, solving equations with missing addends.
• Ask kinder students to show off their number writing. Ask 1st students to solve an equation jumping on a number line. Ask 2nd students to solve a problem with a ? in one part (3+?= 12 or 12-?=3) and to tell a story that matches it. 

Science

• How do we use evidence to support our research?
• Ask them to show how they know that animals use trees to survive. 

Literacy:

• higher order thinking responses to text previously read
• two forms of cinquain poetry (word count / syllable count)
• vowel chunks (-ang, -ank, -ing, -ink, -ong, -ung, -unk)
• writer’s notebook entries (5 minute writing from prompt)
• cursive e, l, f, (reviewing c, a, d, g, t, h, p)
• creative thinking and writing: (comparing things that usually are not compared)
• ***ASK your student about an ice cube and a cookie 

Math:

• using place value to multiply
• multiplying with tens
• introducing division

Science / Social Studies:

• wrapping up our hazelnut study
• moving into a dairy focus via our harvest of the month study courtesy of OAITC (Oregon Agriculture in the Classroom)
• trees as part of our community 

Books we’re reading:

• Bunnicula (20 pages left)
• Hey Batta Batta Swing! The Wild Old Days of Baseball
• Sad Underwear and other complications: More Poems for Children and their Parents