Weekly Calendar St. Vincent Ferrer School Hearts Minds Hands For Christ January 17th – January 23rd Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday January January January January January 17 18 19 20 21 Thursday Friday January January 22 23 Festival Fundraiser – “Out of Uniform” Day Happy Birthday – Angelina Lattimore – Gr.1 Happy Birthday – Carter Tucker – Gr.1 NO SCHOOL - Martin Luther King Jr. Day Bible Lady – “Finding in the Temple– 1:00-2:30 - Chapel – Gr.K-2 8:30 – School Mass – Gr.8 Happy Birthday – Mark Purdy – Gr.2 Principal’s Message Registration Packets: Registration forms for next year (2015-2016) are being sent home in the Green Folders today. The deadline for turning in your forms without incurring a late fee is February 20th! Thank you for your attention to this matter. Open House: Open House is scheduled for Sunday, January 25th from 12:00 to 2:00 PM. All students are encouraged to attend the 11:00 AM Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer Church and wear their SVF uniform. This marks the beginning of our Catholic Schools Week celebration. Important Announcement: 8th grade graduation has been moved to Wednesday, May 27. 8th graders will still have the prayer service Wednesday morning and will be dismissed after the prayer service. Please note this change in your calendar. Weekly Spotlight –Mrs. Frost Happy winter, SVF families! Now that the excitement of the holidays is behind us, our junior high students are busy studying, reading, and writing. In all of our three classes, the students are looking forward to finishing their vocabulary book –only three lessons to go! Studying vocabulary is a painstaking necessary evil, and although we will ALL be happy to move on from it, I do look forward to reading the inventive sentences that the students write on their tests –especially the sentences of those students who choose a sentences theme, like chocolate ;). In addition to vocabulary, all of the junior high students are now taking part in “Writers’ Workshop” based off of the Ohio Writing Project model. For some classes, this is their favorite time of week as students have the opportunity to freewrite following the discussion of prompts. The seventh and eighth graders often use one of these pieces as a springboard for their monthly portfolio pieces, which the sixth grade will soon also be doing. In sixth grade, we have just finished our study of the play The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson. Our study focused on characterization and symbolism, and we had fun acting out some scenes and learning about comic relief. We are also finishing our first major writing piece, a personal narrative, focusing on our writing trait of organization-great hooks and wonderful WOWs(endings). These should be quite entertaining to read! Our seventh grade students are mid-way through reading the novel Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian. Our study focuses on themes of resilience, family and friendship, and the horrors of war and child abuse, as well as characterization. We are finishing our second major piece of writing-an expository essay. The students are entertaining me with a variety of topics, from how to choose a sports team to how to draw a wolf! The eighth graders are beginning to work on their research papers. As I tell the students, this is as much about learning the process as it is about the final paper – if not more so. Throughout this process, the students will learn all the components of a research paper, which will hopefully keep them from looking and feeling like a deer in headlights when such papers are assigned in high school. The eighth graders are also mid-way through reading Harper Lee’s extraordinary novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. We are enjoying the characters of Atticus, Jem, and Scout, along with Ms. Lee’s beautiful prose. All in all, we are passing a pleasant winter inside our junior high language arts classes(all we need is a fireplace :0). I hope that the cold we feel on the outside these long winter days will remind us of the warmth we feel on the inside. God bless. PLAYGROUND SCHEDULE – Attention Playground Volunteers – Please mark your calendars when you are scheduled to help with playground duty. SVF needs your help and counts on you to show up every day (rain or shine). Thanks for your help!! Monday NO SCHOOL Tuesday Sheila Sieder Wednesday Susan Harder Thursday Lisa Samson Library Volunteers: January 22nd (Thursday) - AM – Mary Beth Lohmueller PM - Barb Frooks January 23rd (Friday) - AM – Ann Falci & Karen Schaefer PM - Karen Schaefer & Lisa Schall Servers – Saturday, January 17th and Sunday, January 18th : 5:00 PM – Jackson Donbar / Noah Dunkley / Holland Faller 9:00 AM – Billy Driscoll / Drew Driscoll / Sam Kastner 11:00 AM – Seamus McGrath / Tara McGrath / Matthew Merritt Friday Volunteer Needed