The Hive

Dear HMS Families,

We hope this newsletter finds you well as we enter into the weekend. We have included a bunch of information in this newsletter that we hope will help give you important updates.

We have had such a wonderful time getting to know all of your students so far this year. Our conversations with them are truly the best parts of our day. We have the best job in the world and truly feel that we get to come to work every day. Thank you for trusting us with your children every day. We truly appreciate this amazing community that we get to be part of.

Next week is our first spirit week and we are so excited! We have been planning our outfits for the past couple of weeks and we know many of our students have too. Volleyball-a-Thon is Friday and it's one of the best events of the year.

We hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

With Kindness,

BC & SS

Hello! My name is Ben Nelson. I am the new School Counselor at Hockinson Middle School. For the past five years I was at Woodland Middle School, but have lived in this community so I am excited and grateful to be in Hockinson. If there is anything I can do to help you and your family please feel free to email me at ben.nelson@hocksd.org and I would be more than happy to help.

I wanted to say thank you for the warm welcome to the school community and I look forward to getting to know all the families that make Hockinson Middle School great!

On Friday, September 27th we will be having our annual Volleyball-a-thon. Teams can begin checking in at 5:30pm. The Volleyball-a-thon officially runs from 6:00-midnight. It's a long night, but its incredibly fun and we are thrilled to be able to offer this experience to our HMS community. Our students come up with the best themes for their teams and demonstrate sportsmanship throughout the evening, even when they are tired.

This year, we are excited to have 22 student teams!!!

***If your child is part of a team for Volleyball-a-thon, please make sure they get their money and permission slips in ASAP. Registration increases from $20 to $25 next week.

Please consider volunteering to help with this event. If you are interested, please contact janell.morely@hocksd.org and if you haven't already, please fill out a volunteer application through this link: Volunteer Application

Please know that this is a closed event and only registered teams and registered volunteers will be allowed to participate.

We held our first Lockdown drill this week. When we practice this drill, staff are notified that it is a drill through various forms of communication. Sometimes it might be a face to face conversation as we move classroom to classroom, it might be an email, or an announcement over the intercom, etc. Our teachers immediately stop teaching, lock the door and cover their windows. Our students stay in a specifically identified area of the classrooms and sit silently throughout the drill. As we talked about in the last newsletter, we follow our Emergency Response Protocol (ERP). We encourage you to sit down with your student and talk to them about why we practice safety drills and the importance of taking them seriously. After our drills, we sent out a staff feedback form and our our safety team reviews how we can prioritize safety, communication, and efficiency.

While talking about lockdowns, sometimes there is an increase of conversation about weapons amongst our students. Please know that we are being proactive in communicating to students that when we are at school, this is not an appropriate conversation topic. It would be really helpful for our community if you could please take a moment to remind your student that talking about weapons is not an appropriate topic of conversation at school. We take every conversation seriously and investigate these situations immediately.

Spirit week has arrived and we couldn't be more excited!!! Grade levels compete with their participation in spirit days all week and the grade level who has the most participation ALL week wins our HMS spirit cone. It's possibly the ugliest thing you have ever seen, but the kids love it! The big question is, will our 8th graders continue their undefeated reign OR will our 6th & 7th graders take over as champions? Check out our Facebook page for pictures of the festivities!

Monday: Country vs. Rock & Roll

Tuesday: Nike vs. Adidas

Wednesday: Sports Day

Thursday: Twin Day

Friday: Color Wars

We have seen an increase in Chromebook damages coming through our library. We wanted to remind families to please make sure your child is keeping their case on their Chromebooks. If you have purchased assurance, and the case is removed, the insurance doesn't cover the repairs.

We don't know about you, but every spring when we plan our vegetable gardens, we always try and grow pumpkins, but they have limited success. However, if you follow our Facebook page, you will see that we have been providing updates of our mini pumpkin patch that nature gifted to us. We did not plant this pumpkin plant, it grew with the soil that we spread out during our April Earth Day event last year. We check on these beautiful pumpkins every day and they are amazing! We have eight healthy pumpkins growing in our mini pumpkin patch. Our students would like to use these pumpkins for a Homebase event and we are excited for our contest! The issue is that we have 21 Homebase classrooms and 8 pumpkins that we have grown, which means we are looking for 13 pumpkins to be donated to us during the first week of October. If you are able to help us fulfill this student request, we would be so appreciative! Thank you for your consideration!

Are you interested in physics, engineering, mechanics, and coding? Join the VEX Robotics Club! Students will build and program robots to accomplish fun and challenging tasks. No prior experience with robotics is necessary. The Robotics Club will meet after school Wednesdays from 2:20-4PM in room 107. The first club meeting will be Wednesday October 2nd. Sign up at the ASB office and we hope to see you there!

If your child is interested, please have them stop by Mrs. Morley's office.

We have had a great start to our fall season. We look forward to more success in the coming weeks and hope that you will have an opportunity to support our programs this season.

Upcoming Games -

Volleyball - 7th Grade, 8th Grade, Blended

9/23 - Home vs View Ridge - 4 PM, 5 PM, 6 PM

9/25 AWAY @ Monticello - 3:30 PM

9/30 - Home vs King’s Way - 4 PM

10/2 - AWAY @ Jemtegaard - 4 PM

Cross Country -

9/25 - AWAY @ Lake Sacajawea - 3:15 PM Girls 3:45 PM Boys

10/2 - AWAY @ Kalama - Time TBD

Upcoming Sport Registration -

Winter I sports registration will open October 1st and the season will begin Oct. 24th. Please make sure that your athlete has a current physical on file, and all forms are signed through FinalForms. All athletes must complete 8 practices prior to competing in their first competition.

Final Form Registration

Boys Basketball is open to 7th and 8th graders. We will have 3 teams and not all athletes who tryout will make a team. Tryouts will be 10/24 & 10/25.

Boys and Girls Wrestling is open to 6th - 8th grade boys and girls.

We are excited to be using a new vendor for our yearbooks this year. This new vendor gives us more flexibility with creating, ordering, and documenting the year in pictures. What this means is that you won't be ordering a yearbook through Intouch this year, you will order it through Treering.

Please see the flier below for instructions on how to order your Yearbook.

We have had requests to create an Instagram account so families can follow us on that platform because they don't use Facebook. So, we are excited to share with you all that we created an Instagram account that is connected to our Facebook page! We are looking forward to connecting with our families using both platforms.

We try to post at least one thing a day! If you are curious what we are up to throughout the day, please consider following our Facebook page. We love to give you all insight to all the amazing things that happen here! We have such an awesome community and it's wonderful to be able to celebrate it!

We teach, guide, and support students and our community by creating a safe environment where we learn and grow together.

School Hours: 8:50am-3:20pm

Wednesdays: 1 Hour Early Release

Office Hours: 8:00am - 3:45am

Email: bess.colpron@hocksd.org
Website: https://hms.hocksd.org/
Location: 15916 NE 182nd Ave, Brush Prairie, WA, USA
Phone: 360-448-6440
Facebook: facebook.com/HockinsonMS/