November News

We have had a fun month. The kids made ice cream in a bag for letter “I”. To celebrate our great start to the school year we had a popcorn and movie party. We also got to celebrate Homecoming week. -Mrs. Schroeder

Time flies when you’re having fun! We’ve been busy this month with learning about fire safety, celebrating two birthdays, and having a blast during homecoming week! On the learning part of things, we have mastered almost half of the alphabet!! We will continue to work on our numbers to 10 but switched gears to learn about flat and solid shapes for a while, and the kiddos have been blending sounds to make words! It’s always a great day to be in kindergarten :) - Ms. Brown

In science, first grade is learning about the characteristics of animals that are essential for their survival. We also made observations of parents and their offspring, determining how they are similar and how their behaviors help offspring survive. We did an activity to determine the relationship between the shape of different bird beaks and the food each bird eats. We experimented with long pointy beaks and learned that they are great for picking up seeds and wide beaks are good for scooping. This led to us discovering that different beaks are best for different kinds of food. We love the hands-on learning in science! -Mrs. Ourada

Writing, place value, and planting has been keeping the second graders busy! We have been going through the writing process working on our skills of soon to be authors. We have been mathematicians by practicing place value with three digit numbers while also working on our counting. In science, we have been planting tulips. Even though our experiment didn’t go as expected (which all scientists experience), some of our tulips have sprouted! We have some busy, hardworking writers, mathematicians, and scientists here in second grade!!

-Miss Lichty

The third graders are continuing to work hard while I'm at home on maternity week. Mrs. Torpin took pictures of the students as they participated in the dress up days for homecoming week. Pictured below, we have some dynamic duos, a "Mr. Franzen" and some future teachers with their babies (it made Harper and my day). I'm excited to be back with my class this month!

-Mrs. Martin

The fourth grade students have been working extremely hard in their math classes to make some conversions. The students have been converting Liters to Milliliters, Meters to Centimeters, Kilometers to Meters, Kilograms to Grams, AND back to mixed units! They are truly becoming master converters!

We have been busy little readers during our Reading Block! The student just recently completed the novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.. They loved all the twists and turns of Dorothy and her friends as they found their way to Oz and then had their wishes granted. We have moved onto learning more about fables while reading, The Ugly Duckling. One of our focuses this month has been on using text evidence to support our answers. We have also learned the difference between Firsthand and Secondhand Accounts, and we have just recently learned that in literature they are referred to as First-Person and Third-Person!

Finally, we are in the middle of enjoying the Homecoming 2022 dress up days! The students have done a great job participating and have LOVED each other's costumes each day!

-Mrs. Smith

Once again 6th graders will be making Dioramas for some of the novels they will read during reading class this year. The students will be asked to choose one of the scenes depicted in the novel and create a diorama of that scene. They will be given a shoe box and they will be instructed to use any materials they want to construct their dioramas.

The 6th graders would like to ask that if anyone has a shoebox they are not using and would like to donate we would appreciate it. With 17 6th graders in class it takes a lot of show boxes to create these projects. Thanks in advance for any help you can give us.

Our first diorama of the year will be created using the novel Hatchet. We will be posting pictures to the SEM Mr Williams facebook page when the students get them completed. I am including a copy of the rubric we will be using to grade these dioramas.

-Mr Williams

7th Grade is currently finishing up their book Hush by Jacqueline Woodsen. In this book, Toswiah Green is an African American girl living in Denver. Her life seems perfect until her father, a police officer, witnesses two of his fellow officers murder a small boy. After he testifies, the family is relocated using the Witness Protection Program. While reading the book, we discuss the consequences the family must face from doing the right thing and how these kinds of issues are happening today.

-Mrs. Kociemba

We are currently focusing on the foundational skills of geography such as people & resources, economy & trade, as well as government & citizenship.

---In order to learn about the impact humans have on earth, we mined for chocolate using toothpicks. Students were given a chocolate chip cookie and had five minutes to get as many chocolate chips from their cookie as

possible. They could use any technique as long as they used their toothpick and NOT their hands! We discussed the spillover effect our crumbs or “dirt” had on the surrounding environment when we were done.

---For economy and trade, students were given a random amount of candy and played a game to demonstrate the different economic systems: command, market, and mixed.

-Mrs. Kociemba

This month has been an exciting month in English! Students have moved out of the Parts of Speech grammar reviews and moved into the more exciting parts of novels and papers! The Freshman/Sophomore class has been working hard on building background knowledge of the Holocaust by reading articles and writing essays on the different aspects of it. They are preparing to read Night, a true story written by a Holocaust survivor. The Junior/Senior class jumped into Divergent, an action packed book that teaches the importance of being yourself and being able to think for yourself. The Sophomores wrote a persuasive essay on their beliefs of fairy tales after reading some articles on the subject and are now starting To Kill A Mockingbird, a personal favorite of mine that teaches so many important life lessons. The Eighth Graders are enjoying Something Upstairs, a lightly spooky story, before writing a spooky story of their own- just in time for Halloween! The Freshman have been coming to class, begging to read Romeo and Juliet right away instead of doing the other daily activities first! They are enjoying the emotional rollercoaster of this classic! The Juniors are working through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is a tough read with so much dialect in the dialogue, but they are doing a great job with it!
Journalism is also busy creating great pages in the yearbook, doing assignments to build their skills, and working with Paul Pack on their photography!

-Mrs. Trampe

The Physical Science class was given the opportunity to use their skills in dimensional analysis in a real world situation. They were given the task to make fudge with a recipe that contained units that were hard to use (e.g. 1.32 x 10-3 gallons of milk to teaspoons of milk). We discussed the fact that some recipes that are found online may use metric units and need to be converted in order to use the recipe. We also discussed situations where we may travel to another country and we would want to be able to convert temperature, volume, speed (km/hr to mi/hr), etc. to a measurement that we can relate to.

The students agreed that learning how to use dimensional analysis is tough, but it was well worth it in the end when their fudge tasted delicious because they were able to convert the ingredient measurements to the correct unit.

-Mrs. Pierce

A bit late, but the September book fair was a major success! Thanks to all the parents, students, and grandparents that stopped by, the SEM Book Fair raised over $4020.98! That gives the SEM Library roughly $2010.49 in Scholastic Dollars to spend on coding and STEM supplies for students to enjoy. Thank you everyone!

-Mrs. Kociemba

Email: gtorpin@semmustangs.org
Website: https://www.semmustangs.org/
Location: 205 East 5th Avenue, Sumner, NE, USA
Phone: 308-752-2925
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