Willow Horne - Middle School Teacher

6/7/8: Slip showing the receipt of the middle school phone trees, and the Reading/Writing requirements. DUE ASAP
6: Field Trip Permission Slip. DUE 12/5

7/8: Finish Goals Articulation Sheet. Use beautiful, complete sentences for both goals and planning. DUE 11/26

6/7/8: answer one question about your reading book from Bloom's Taxonomy Reading Questions for this week. DUE 11/26

6/7/8: Wordly Wise Lesson Four. DUE 12/12 TEST 12/12

History Alive: The Medieval World and Beyond

The below are a list of suggested books. Please consider reading as many as possible by the end of eighth grade (and for the rest of your life!)

Middle School Book List *
(* This is a work in progress and welcomes suggestion)

Fiction

A Day No Pigs Would Die
A Little Princess
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
A Wrinkle in Time
Adventures of Robin Hood
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Alanna: The First Adventure
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Amber Spyglass
Anne of Green Gables
Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret
Arthur, For the Very First Time
As I Lay Dying
Black Beauty
Blubber
Bridge to Terebithia
Brisingr
Catch 22
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Cheaper By the Dozen
Confessions of Nat Turner
Eldest
Emma
Eragon
Esperanza Rising
Fahrenheit 451
Five Children and It
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER
From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
Gilgamesh
Gulliver’s Travels
Harriet the Spy
Hatchet
Heidi
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Holes
House of Seven Gables
How to Be a Real Person
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Into the Wild
Island of the Blue Dolphins
James and the Giant Peach
Jane Eyre
Julie of the Wolves
Kidnapped
Last of the Mohicans
Little House in the Big Woods
Little Women
Long Night of white chickens
Lord of the Flies
Loser
Love, Stargirl
Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography (2006)
Man in the Iron Mask
Maniac Magee
Mara: Daughter of the Nile
Mary Poppins
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
My Antonia
My Friend Flicka
My Side of the Mountain
National Velvet
Never Cry Wolf
NightJohn
Number the Stars
Odyssey
Of Mice and Men
Oliver Twist
One Eyed Cat
One Thousand and One Arabian Nights
Out of the Dust
Outsiders
Peter Pan
Pippi Longstocking
Pride and Prejudice
Red Badge of Courage
Redwall
Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry
Sabriel
Seedfolks
Shiloh
Silas Marner
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Sounder
Speak
Spirited Away
Stargirl
Summer of the Swans
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Birchbark House
The Black Stallion
The Bonesetters Daughter
The Call of the Wild
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm
The Education of Little Tree
The Egypt Game
The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt
The Giver
The Golden Goblet
The Grapes of Wrath
The Hobbit
The House on Mango Street
The hunchback of Notre Dame
The Incredible Journey
The Island of the Blue Dolphins
The Jungle Book
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Little Prince
The Lives of a Cell
The Ohlone Way
The Old Man and the Sea
The Pearl
The Phantom Tollbooth
The Red Pony
The Riverhouse Stories: How Pubah S. Queen and Lazy LaRue Save the World
The Sea-Wolf
The Secret Garden
The Sign of the Beaver
The Snow Goose
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
The Subtle Knife
The Watson’s go to Birmingham
The Wind in the Willows
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Things Fall Apart
This House of Sky
Three Musketeers
Time Machine
Travels With Charley
Treasure Island
Tuck Everlasting
Unclaimed Treasures
Where the Red Fern Grows
White Fang
Wizard of Oz
Zlatas Diary

Non-Fiction
Animal Vegetable Mineral
Botany of Desire
Branded (marketing to teens)
Cadillac Desert
Code Talker
Desert Solitaire
Fast Food Nation
Ishi, Last of His Tribe
Manifesto of the Future of Food
Midsummer Nights Dream
Nobody Particular (graphic novel)
Our Town
Refuge
Sand Country Almanac
Silent Spring
The Cat Who Went to Heaven
The Man who Planted Trees
The Tao of Pooh
The Te of Piglet
Totem Salmon
Touching Spirit Bear
Walden
Water Wars
When the Rivers Run Dry

Dear Families,

We’d like to thank all parents, guardians, and students for attending conferences this week.
We like to see our students develop their own awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, and we heard them articulate these this week. In growing as a learner, “Knowing is half the battle!”

The 4th through 8th grade traveled by bus to the Dance Palace in Point Reyes on Tuesday to see the Sumi Ballet & Urban Art Farm. Students learned some of the traditions and rituals for ballet, and got on stage with the dancers to make up their own dance.
While we continue to work on geography of the world, the 8th graders have embarked on mapping of the heavens. Tuesday night they oriented themselves with a scale model of our galaxy, constructed of salt poured onto the pavement by our classroom. They also visited the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest neighbor, located across the yard by the Quesada. After getting their bearings, they headed out into the darkness of the field and charted some of the fall constellations.

Today, Friday, they’re on the beach in Stinson, laying out a scale model of the solar system. In the words of poet Gary Snyder, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” For the 8th graders, looking at the stars is as much about knowing where you’re standing as it is knowing where you’re looking.

Note for the 6th grade:

Our field trip to Lagunitas is next Tuesday! I just wanted to let you know that I will be leaving from Lagunitas when the 6th grade does (2:00 ish) to go to a meeting over the hill, and the 6th grade will return to Bolinas with the adult they came with to be dismissed by Don.
For the field trip please bring:
o Either $3.50 or a bag lunch for lunch (Lagunitas is catered by the Good Earth – I have heard it is very tasty!)
o A hat and sunscreen
o A water bottle
o Clothes that can get dirty
o Sturdy shoes

May peace be with you,


Willow & Don
http://bolinas-stinson.org/users/willowh/

Friday Letter
October 10, 2008

Dear Familes,
I can feel the impending autumn, and I begin to think more about tea. I was grateful for the rain last weekend, and find myself enjoying the sun and warmth all the more for it. In an attempt to lessen paper, I am going to begin posting these Friday letters on my blog:

http://bolinas-stinson.org/users/willowh/


Please let me know if you read them, and if you have a preference in format.

This week we had a special guest come in to talk about geography. Larry Enos studied geography in college, and kindly visited our classrooms to share his knowledge. He spoke of the connections between culture and place, and their impact upon our lives. Next week the students will be embarking upon a DYOH project about a country of their choosing, so I look forward to sharing these with Larry and seeing what great thoughts they are able to present to us.

In Writer’s Workshop, I introduced the students to a plot point outline. Many books and movies follow this structure. There is a beginning, a middle and an end, and two plot points that distinguish a conflict or a change between these three sections. The classes diagramed the book Holes and the movie “Finding Nemo”. I will be asking them to use this and other graphic organizers to outline their thinking for future writing projects.

In the sciences, middle school students are laying foundations for their respective studies by constructing maps. For sixth and sevenths graders these are maps of local geography. Sixes will use these to acquaint themselves to the lay of the land – its underlying structure, the movements of air and water over its surface. For the sevens, these maps are the background upon which their study of plant communities will be drawn.

Eighth graders, meanwhile, have their heads turned to the heavens – they’ve begun tracking the motions of the sun, the moon, and are preparing for their first night out under the stars. The tools at their disposal are rudimentary – sticks, shadows, circles drawn on circles – but the information gained is already shedding light on the patterns and cycles upon which so much of our experience depends.

May peace be with you,
Willow & Don

Phew! And I thought no one was reading this! I am so pleased with how the students are doing thus far. It is a little over a month into school and they are certainly progressing. I espcially enjoy seeing some of them come into their own in terms of self-motivation. I am here to offer opportunities for them to learn, and they are here to take advantage of those opportunities. I love it when one of them says, "Can I have some help with this?"

I am going to try to keep the homework updated on here. I do not know if I will be able to put hard copies up for you to print out at home, but I will see what can be done.

• Right here should be the list of items I would like the students to have on their maps. We will work on these maps in class, and the students may have to complete them at home. Please let me know if you need an atlas to use.

• For the next few weeks we will be studying geography. Each student will fill out maps with the names of countries and major physical features. They will then have these maps to use when they take a geography test. We are also going to enter into the National Geographic GeoBee this year, so look for more information about that!

• New this week is a workbook called Wordly Wise. Each student should complete Chapter One this week. Next week they will write either sentences or a story using their words, take a test on them, and then begin Chapter Two.

• My math group is working on Order of Operations and Exponents. Tonight's homework is the Problem Solving page for Order of Operations.

I went for my first walk on the beach since arriving here this week. An old friend came out to visit and we went downtown after school on Wednesday. The weather was fabulous, a guy was paddling while standing up on a surfboard, and there was a dog with two people in a kayak out past the breakers. My friend collected a few pieces of sea glass to take back to her Boston flat, and we talked about our new teaching positions - her in college, and me here in middle school.

What strikes me the most is the underlying current of community. It is rare to find a place where most of the students in a class have been a consistent group. We held a parent meeting last week and we had almost every parent attend. For some students we even had both parents. In this day and age, this is almost unheard of, and is a fantastic example of the community involvement and investment in the school.

The week was still full of firsts - first Tuesday (we still haven't had a Monday), first homework, first writing assessment. I am still settl
ing into the classroom and getting to know my students. I get small glimpses into their inner workings and I admit - I am fascinated. It is like a flash of a whole new universe, and I can not wait to find out what else it has to offer. What I most enjoy about teaching is finding the unique strengths of each student. Sometimes these are outside of the box. One student totally wowed me with his ability to play the congas. His focus was intense, and he was able to not only play, but to teach.

We learn by doing, and I am struck again and again by how little I really know about anything. One of my favorite quotes is "I know enough to know that I know nothing." The days with my students thus far have been rich, and they will only become more facinating as my students grow in their ability to learn and teach about things that matter to them.

Check back soon for updates.