Welcome to the first autumn feeling weekend of the year.  While it has been a short week, it has certainly been a busy week.

1. Hillcrest Celebrated Our First BIG Spirit Day today.  Our team area was glowing yellow with kids in hats, bandanas, shades, shoes, shirts and pants all in our team colour.  After working on our team cheer for the past two weeks, students rocked our team verison of We Are Young.  Here’s a sneak peek at part of the cheer We Are Yellow

2. Today was an authentic Highlander Day with fresh scotch mist throughout the afternoon.  Students started in the gym to meet our school mascot Harry and then ventured through a Highland Fling, Skiing Down the Countryside, Giant Volleyball, a Haggis Pass, a Caber Toss and a FitnessCircuit with Harry.  The afternoon was topped with the call of the bagpipes to move between stations.

2. Interim Reports will be coming home on Friday October 12th for students in grade 8.  Students in grade 6/7 have received their IEPs this month and the IEP is the form of interim reporting that we will be using.  The IEP includes detailed information about your son or daughter’s goals.  If you have specific concerns, please feel free to call the school and book a parent teacher conference.  If we have any concerns about your son or daughter’s first weeks of school we will be contacting individual parents to set up meetings.

3. The grade 8’s are working through a unit of cells and completed a Cheek Cell Lab. “So we took a toothpick and scraped the inside of our cheeks. And then we took the cheek cells and looked at them under a microscope using dry mounts, wet mounts, water and iodine. We also had a test about plant and animal cells.”  Grade 6/7’s are working through an introduction to science and will be beginning to think about a science fair project (inquiry project on a science topic).  Grade 7/8’s will have the opportunity to present the school / district at the Greater Vancouver Regional Science Fair.  All MACC locations will be hosting a Science Fair on March 1st 2013 at Winslow gym.

4. The grade 8’s are currently in Art and Dramus.  In Dramus, students are making podcasts on Audacity. In Art, students are working on Symbolic Portraits using objects and images to represent each student. The grade 6/7’s are currently in Home Ec and Tech Ed.

5. Grade 8’s have been working on a Points of Prideproject.  “It’s a group of 12 different activities and one big project at the end that gets you to look at yourself and how you function.”

6. Ms.Moody and Ms. Abbot had student teachers observing in class for the week and they will be joining us again next week.  Ms. MacKay and Mr Buhler are from SFU and have just started the SFU Teacher Program this semester.  They will be returning in November to participate in the classes and team activities and will be team teaching with Ms. Abbot and Ms. Moody.  We are looking forward to working with these two as they begin their teaching careers and are looking forward to their contributions to our classes.

7.  We also have Health Science students from SFU volunteering in our school this Fall.  The students working with us are hoping to look at some topics relating to stress management, wellness and possibly executive functions.  They are most likely going to present workshops to the classes about these topics and other healthy living topics. We are also looking forward to their contributions to the class and have appreciated having the extra adult volunteers in class over the past several weeks.

8. Grade 6/7’s are continuing their mini projects on world geography and have started their first projects looking at how different environmental and geographical features effect human settlement in different countries.  Students has a wide breadth of choices in the countries and features they can choose for this project.  They have had two double blocks of time in the library this week, with access to computers and all the resources in the Library (including Ms. Trieu our librarian).

9. Students now have their passwords to log into their school district email and if waiver forms have been returned they have access to their edmodo accounts.  Ms. Moody and Ms. Abbot will be emailing out parent access codes over the coming week.

10. Today grade 6/7 students participated in a Guiness Book Science Lab.  Students completed two separate experiments in the gym with almost all the grade 6/7 classes in the school.  Check out the Government of Canada Science and Technology Page for more details and for video introductions to the two science experiments students participated in today.

Have a safe and enjoyable weekend.