December 17
Muskrat News
Upcoming events: December 20-31 Winter Break
From our Executive Director
The staff of Muddy Creek wishes you all a safe and family-centered holiday season. It will be a great time to have family fun enjoying the wonderful children in your lives. Being a teacher I have to say the two weeks out of school provide parents with a number of opportunities to help your child(ren) read, do mental math, and write. Purposely have your child explain, describe, evaluate, or predict. Trips to shop give adults the chance to have kids do all of the above in a fun and easy way. Read signs or do the alphabet as you drive to a destination. Just playing games are helpful for students to sharpen thinking skills.
We want students doing their best here at school. We like very much the Lifelong Guidelines (Trustworthiness, Truthfulness, Active Listening, No Put-downs, and Personal Best) for bringing into focus what a child can do well in school if they choose. The LIFESKILLS that lead to doing your personal best that we have covered so far are: caring, common sense, cooperation, courage, curiosity, effort and flexibility. Next up is friendship. We all know how important friends are to each person no matter what their station in life may be. Help your child see that to have friends, you must first be a friend. Friends are like oxygen or water, you have to have them. Let us know if your child is struggling with this. We want to help.
Shari Ame applied for and received a grant from the Corvallis Arts Center to provide Muddy Creek with an artist-in-residence experience. Thank you so much Shari. And another thank you to Carla Callahan for her work on our school scrip. That effort has raised nearly $700 so far. And we have received over $500 in donations that will help us bring music back next year. The money raised will help us put more books into the library, and buy reading and math materials for the classrooms. We are very grateful for what has been a great start to this school year.
-Dan
Classroom News
Room 1 -We have continued our studies of the sun and energy this week. Tuesday the weather finally cooperated and we were able to see a solar panel work. It was really exciting to see the fan go just from the energy from the sun. – Miss Bridget
Room 2 –We took advantage of the relatively warmer weather to get outside on Tuesday afternoon. The 3rd graders were doing a “Microclimate Challenge” — looking for the spots in our schoolyard that might make tulips grow more slowly or more quickly than our class garden. They wrote up their predictions and then got to planting. First and second graders investigated what our playground looks like after an inch of rain has fallen — measuring puddles in “kid feet” and finding the biggest spots of accumulation in our schoolyard watershed. Have a great break, everyone! – Ms. Gorman
Kindergarten – A Shared Kindergarten Lesson: This week during our Buddy Time the 4/5th graders joined us in the studio for an art lesson. I had set up the document camera so that we could view a variety of art work from the Getting to Know The World’s Greatest Artists series. We only had enough time to see a few paintings by Paul Klee and Picasso. We ended the session with a viewing of a painting by a local artist, Carrie Tasman. The painting is called Tea with Three Sisters. Later, several students came up to me to share their personal experiences, in the town of Sisters.
The objectives for this lesson were to see shapes within shapes, repeating patterns of color or shape, and to get a feel for how an artist accomplishes balance so that our eyes travel in a path around the picture. What inspired me to do this lesson was the realization that I need to teach art appreciation so that the students gain the language to describe a work of art. Saying that a classmates’ painting is beautiful or ugly, can often hurt feelings. Describing balance, color or shape, allows the conversation to be open ended and constructive.
At one moment, as I looked around the room, I felt a balance happening between the two classes. Everyone sat respectfully listening and students from both classes added comments that enhanced the learning experience. In Kindergarten we learn about “Magic Lines”. In that moment, I felt magic. May you all have a magical holiday season with your family and friends.
– Miss Jenny
Room 4 – We went to the OSU Wave Lab this week and it was fantastic. The Lab produced two huge waves for kids and then a bunch of waves at once. A student from our class taught the other students how to make aluminum foil dragons and another student taught the kids how to make Japanese Origami. – Mr. Day
From the Board
The Homework Policy Committee has begun its work. The Board appreciates the parents and staff who were willing to join. If you have anything you’d like to bring to our attention, please contact kriste.york@gmail.com
We hope that Winter Break is a good one for all of the members of the Muddy Creek Community.
Muddy Creek Writing Club
In January, Cedar Dunn (aka Miss Cedar in the office) will be forming a Writing Club for 4th and 5th graders. The club will meet once a week right after school on Wednesdays. We will have an awesome time writing non-fiction, short stories, plays, poetry, and songs. If your child is interested please let me know. You can email me at cedar.dunn@muddycreekcharterschool.org or stop by the office. Thanks!
Muddy Creek Scratch Club
Would you and/or your child like to learn to make videogames? Join the Scratch Club! We will be meeting at Muddy Creek once a week, right after school on Thursdays, to create games, learn programming, animation, art and more.
My name is Bill Pfeil (Casey’s dad). I’m a full-time programmer and part-time video game designer, and I’ll be helping everyone learn how to use Scratch. If you’re interested in the Scratch Club, please contact me directly: bill@dropdstudios.com .
New to Scratch? Download Scratch for free and give it a spin: http://scratch.mit.edu
Special Thanks To:
Just when we thought it couldn’t get any cuter around here, we have been treated to homemade holiday favors by our beloved Grandma Betty York. Every student received an adorable lollipop Santa ornament. The staff was treated to beautiful holiday door hangers. Thank you Betty!
SCRIP:
New order forms are available now with updated due dates for the remainder of the school year. You can pick up a form from one of the boxes to the right of the parent mailboxes. Thank you for getting Scrip off to a great start at MCCS this year!
ESCRIP:
Please consider taking the few moments it takes to sign up your Safeway and/or debit cards for our school on the eScrip website. By doing this, a percentage of the money you spend at Safeway and participating retailers and restaurants goes to our school. You can also use their “Online Mall” to take advantage of even more opportunities to contribute to MCCS. The website is www.escrip.com and when you sign up our group name is Muddy Creek Charter School and our ID # is 500020320. IMPORTANT: if you have previously signed your cards up before this September, you must do it again for this school year or we will stop getting contributions.
Safeway 10% Back to Schools starts January 2nd, 2011!
Look for tags with the yellow school bus January 2nd – 25th, use your Club Card to buy those items, pick MCCS to get 10% at the end of the program (a message will print on your receipt with instructions). This is 6% more than Safeway usually contributes with regular Scrip so please think of the school when you are shopping! More information can be found at http://backtoschools.escrip.com/.