Mrs. Hallford’s Class Newsletter

October 14-16

Malkia shows us the beautiful ceremonial Inca mask she made in History.

I hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend! Don’t forget to sign up to help out with our class booths for the upcoming Fall Festival. Our class is going to have a color hairspray booth and a bowling booth, and the sign-up sheet is outside our classroom door. We had a lot of fun at the first Fall Festival last year, and I’m really looking forward to it!

Last week we finished up Surviving The Applewhites as planned, and started an art project based on the novel. The students are drawing portraits of the main character, Jake Semple, from the beginning and end of the book to illustrate how he changed throughout the course of the story. We also talked about how many of them hadn’t originally thought he could change at all, and how people have the ability to change themselves and make good decisions no matter what others may think of them. We will finish that art project this week, and I plan to let the class spend Thursday afternoon watching The Sound of Music. I am also going to attempt to prepare some spicy Indian food for the students to sample while they watch the movie, since that was discussed in the novel quite a bit, and they are all curious to try it out!

We devoted quite a bit of time to our history lessons this past week, studying the native cultures that existed in Central and South America when the Spanish explorers and colonists began to arrive. I split the class into Aztec and Inca empires, and each student was given an aspect of their culture to study, create a product, and give a presentation to their classmates. I loved how much time and effort they devoted to this assignment! A lot of the students volunteered to work on their projects at home, although this was not assigned, and their presentations were informative and interesting. Two of our students were assigned the traditional foods of their cultures, so Laura-Jane popped some Inca popcorn (on the stove, not in the microwave!) since that was one of the foods the Inca stored in their storehouses. Mike made Aztec hot chocolate, with a great deal of effort. He had to grate unsweeted baking chocolate and mix it with hot water, vanilla, and chili powder to create the drink of Aztec royals. We got to sample these foods during the presentation times.

Having learned about these important pre-Columbian cultures, we are going to spend this coming week learning about the Spanish conquistadors, particularly Cortez, and the conquest of Central and South America.

We are also going to spend some time on fall gardening this week, planting carrots, broccoli, and radishes in our garden plot. I would also love to have the students plant some bulbs such as tulips or daffodils, etc., if anyone would like to donate the bulbs to our class!

I’ve mentioned before that our class is using the Lost Tools of Writing curriculum, along with the rest of the upper school. They are doing a wonderful job! We have worked through most of the first unit, learning strategies to brainstorm ideas, a format for creating outlines, and how to convert an outline into an essay. These are the three basic lessons that we will be working with all year, adding more depth and detail with each unit. The students are all working hard and do particularly well when it comes to brainstorming ideas (called ‘Invention’ in the writing curriculum).

Have a great week and God bless!

Nicole Hallford

Mrs. Hallford’s Class Newsletter

October 6-9

I hope everyone had a great experience at the Flint Academy Open House! I really enjoyed getting to speak with everyone who was there, as well as meeting some prospective Flint families.

Last week we finished up our study of Columbus with a written narration. This is an informal way of assessing what the students learned and retained for a given topic. I told them to write down everything they could remember about Columbus, and gave them plenty of time to do so. I was pleased with the amount of information that the class was able to recall! We are now moving into a shorter study of South America and the Spanish and Portuguese explorations there. We will focus on the cultures that already existed in South America, their interactions with European explorers, and native flora and fauna.

We have spent a week preparing for a debate on Sarah Palin, reading an article about her policies in World Magazine. We postponed the debate till Monday, so students could watch the vice presidential debate if they wanted more information. I’m excited to see what they do with this topic!

We are nearly finished with our novel, Surviving The Applewhites. I expect to finish it sometime this week, and then we will do several projects relating to the content of the novel before moving on. Since the characters in the book put on a production of The Sound of Music, and that is a major element of the story, we will be watching The Sound of Music in class. I love helping the students make connections between a novel and other media, because their awareness of the book is so heightened!

In Art we have completed some wonderful picture studies of the Santa Maria, and they are hanging in the hallway outside our class if anyone would like to take a look. I’ll send these home after they have been enjoyed on display for a while!

God bless!

~Nicole Hallford