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Attention:  McClure students & your families

You are invited to join us in celebrating Cultural Arts Night!

When:  Thursday Feb. 11, 2010 @ 7:00 PM

Where:  McClure Middle School

We need all families, students or groups of students who would like to present their country of origin, somewhere you have traveled to or a culture that you have studied to be a part of this great night!

 You can be as creative as you want to be!

Cultural Arts Night will include:

• Table presentations with information about your country, artifacts, power

     point presentations, a skit, native dance, native sport, food samples or

     anything about your country that you would enjoy sharing with everyone

• Community outreach opportunities to support Must Ministries 
• Interactive learning stations
• Entertainment with our band & orchestra
• Student art on display
• An international fashion show
• An international food contest & an international chocolate contest.

(We need donations of international food & international chocolate.)

We will be collecting donations of peanut butter & jelly for Must Ministries!

We want you to be a part of this fun night

brought to you by your PTSA!

Please contact us: Patty Reinhardt @ reinrpar@comcast.net, 770-421-1782 (H), 678-640-5718 (C) &

Deanna Slone @ Deannaslone@msn.com, 678-290-8574 (H), 678-429-8144 (C)

I was out again on Monday (my son had some complications after surgery), so they did not get a chance to learn anything new on Monday.

Tuesday and Wednesday they worked in pairs on a worksheet and poster that is designed to help them discover what a direct variation graph looks like and that there is a constant number that is also represented in these equations.

Tomorrow we will present the posters and group discuss what they have discovered. Then we will watch a power point and begin notes on these types of equations and their graphs.

NO HOMEWORK THIS WEEK due to conference schedule. We will be back to our regular routine of warm ups and homework next week.

If your child made Renaissance during the 2nd nine weeks and is going on the Stars and Stripes field trip, please turn in the money and permission forms. They are due Friday. Thanks.

Today they worked in pairs on a worksheet to help them learn about Direct Variation. It involved graphing and using a table to find the values of y for an equation. This is similar to what we have been doing. We will be developing more ideas from this data.

I will be out all of next week (the kids know this and that my son has to have surgery). They will be working on review worksheets involving what we have been doing this unit, as well as some problems from earlier this year. They have been informed that these will be graded and put in the “Review” category in the grade book. I am not grading on completion, but of accuracy. These are great CRCT type of problems. We have been working towards eliminating answers that are not logical, as well as doing the computations to solve the problems. This will also reinforce those goals.

We will continue with Direct and Indirect Variations beginning January 25.

NOTE: Conference week is January 25th. This will be an early release week. If you have not returned your child’s conferenece sheet confirming whether you can come to conference, please do so.

Today we took a quiz on coordinate planes and functions. We first returned papers that were graded, reviewed the ones that were incorrect and discussed any problems. We then took the quiz. Grades for classwork and homework are updated on Pinnacle. Any missing grades can still be turned in for credit.

NO HOMEWORK – we did not have time for a new lesson. Beginning new unit tomorrow.

Yesterday we had a substitute and each student had an individual review packet. These will be graded and posted as a review grade.

Today we continued working on graphing and solving for “y” in an equation. We started by giving students a coordinate and they had to plot it on a large floor coordinate plane. They had to practice moving right/left and then up/down. Hopefully this helped them learn which directions they need to move and in what order.

(X,Y) is an ordered pair that is plotted. The X is right or left. Positive x is right, negative x is left. The Y is up or down. Positive y is up, negative y is down.

Then we again practiced substituting a value in for X into an equation to solve for Y. Today’s classwork involved showing how this was done. They x and y values were already given.

HW: 4-6 Problem Solving page. Attached is the page and the solution, if this helps understand how to do the problems.

QUIZ TOMORROW on coordinate plane. Those that have not finished these for homework can continue to work on them. Notes attached.Geom_-_Coor_Plane_Unit_PowerPoint

Functions 4-6 Problem solving

Today we learned that equations can be set up like functions. We describe them like building things on “how it’s made.” You have some material, you put it in the machine, and you get a new item. We take a value for x, put it into the equation, and find the value for y. They then have an ordered pair of x and y that can be graphed.

Example:   y = 2x       if x = 1    then   y = 2 (1)  then y = 2

Sometimes the values for x are given to us: such as in a table. Othertimes we can choose the value for x. We discussed how we want to choose x values that are easy to use: 0, 1, 2 are examples, depending on the problem.

In class we worked on a worksheet using this information. This will be a class work grade.

HW: Practice A 4-6 

We continued working on graphing points on the coordinate plane. We worked in class on in our worktext pages to practice.

HW: Some students have a coordinate plane with several points that are to be graphed and connected to form a picture (it should look like Snoopy). Other students have a smaller coordinate plane that when graphed and connected forms a star. These are different from what is written in their agenda, since we did not get as far in class as was planned.

puzzles_twisters     star homework

We are beginning a new unit. This will involve graphing equations on the coordinate plane. We began today by taking notes that involved filling in blanks on study guides. These involved the x and y axis, coordinates, tables and graphing. We worked on a worksheet in class and they each took turns graphing a point on the graph board. They need to understand how to graph points and how to find x and y values using an equation to learn our new unit.

HW: Finish worksheet 4-1.