What's Up at St. Mark's? 1-19-11
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA["Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" John 1:29b
Wednesday at chapel, Southern Illinois District Deaconess Sandy Bowers talked to the students about her work visiting women in prison and giving them the Gospel message. She reminded that we are connected with everyone through our faith in Jesus.
Last week the Preschoolers practiced left and right during their gym time. They also learned about pairs, matching, and practiced counting. Together with the Kindergarten, they brought snowmen from home to put in the Winter Display in the hallway. If you haven't seen this yet, stop by-the snowmen are extremely varied! Both PK and K also learned about the 17 different types of penguins, their habitats, and what they eat. They made penguin puppets and had a Black and White Day Friday where they created a Penguin Land and played penguin games while wearing all black and white! The groups also enjoyed Zebra Pudding made with layers of chocolate and vanilla pudding made with layers of chocolate and vanilla pudding served with Zoo animal crackers.
As well as participating in the joint activities above, Kindergarten studied the letter Z by creating zig-zag patterns, wrote "z" words, created a class Zoo book and made Zany Zoo Animals by morphing two zoo animals together! Finally, in math, the students identified and counted up to $0.10 and solved story problems by drawing pictures.
First Grade's Bible stories were about Jesus' baptism and how Jesus called his first disciples. We are Jesus' disciples (followers) also. We are learning about article adjectives in English, and about the er, ar, or, and ir sounds in phonics. We have started using rulers to make straight lines on math. We sang for the handicapped accessible service last week and got to walk over to church in a little bit of snow.
Third Grade read a story called "Brave Irene". She bravely traveled through a snowstorm to her destination. With the event of ALL the snow here in Illinois, this was a timely assignment. We then made our own "snow" and snow scene.
Fourth Grade finally had time to start digging into information about the South Central States. We learned about their farming, forestry, ranching and oil industry. We also listened to Louis Armstrong after talking about the jazz in New Orleans.
Fifth Grade just took a history test and the class is beginning a chapter about the expansion west and the Civil War. "Go West, young man!"
Sixth Grade began reading a nonfiction unit on ancient Egypt. The students enjoy reviewing information about mummies and pyramids. In English they are wrapping up Ch. 5 where they covered helping verbs, inverted word order and adverb exceptions. The students have begun writing a five-paragraph essay.
Seventh Grade is currently reading the novel "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry," a novel about a Southern black family in the 1030's who faces prejudice and discrimination. In English they finished Chapter 8 where they reviewed all of the concepts they have studied this year. They will begin learning about pattern 2 sentences and complex sentences next. They also wrote five-paragraph essays that will be on display on the third floor.
The Eighth grade also has their essays on display and also reviewed their English concepts from the first semester. They are currently reading the novel "A Christmas Carol" by Dickens. The novel is helping the students expand their vocabularies.