I hope everyone had a great Holiday Season; and that you and your family were able to rest, relax, and enjoy each other. We will be hitting the ground running this third quarter- studying poetry, immigration, and volunteering in our community. We will also begin studying opinion or persuasive writing.

We will try and have a Read-In in February for fundraising our upcoming field trips; Alyeska the week before spring break, and Peterson Bay May 4-6th. Both of these trips are expensive so please put aside some funds and have your child use the fundraising opportunity. We will need chaperones for both trips so please let me know if you would like to participate.

Our community groups trips will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays through third quarter. The 4th grade students will be going with Ms. O’Brien to the Soldotna Senior Center, the 5th grade students with me to the KP Food Bank, and the 6th grade students with Mrs. Carter to the Riverside House.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, and that you were able to enjoy your family, relatives, and friends. We have been very busy this second quarter. I do want to thank all of you who came and had a conference with me. I really enjoy meeting with all of you and learning more about your children. I am very thankful to be working with each and every one of them!

We have a short, busy December ahead. Make sure to look at newsletters, and our calendar for specific information. 5th and 6th grade students will be traveling to the Challenger Learning Center, while I will be taking all of the school’s 4th grade students to the FAA and Kenai Airport (Thanks Andy McClure!). This field trip along with winter arts and crafts, and a trip through our community to sing holiday songs.

After the holiday break, third quarter will have a focus of community service, and students will be learning about immigration past and present. 4th grade students will be visiting the Soldotna Senior Center, 5th graders the Food Bank, and 6th graders the Riverside House. If you are able to help please let me know.

Some photos from Halloween:

What a great field trip our class had! We went to the KNWR Swanson River OEC and Kelly/Peterson Lakes trail. Students learned the seven “Leave No Trace” principles, and planned/prepared a one-pot meal for the hike on the second day. We would like to thank all of our parent chaperones and volunteers, Mrs. Ostrowski, and all parents who helped their children gear up. We missed several students as a bug was going around; that was the only negative.

We have Dan from the Kenai Watershed Forum coming in today. He’s going to introduce water quality testing to the fourth grade students and review the process for fifth and sixth grade students. We will be working with Dan throughout the school year monitoring Soldotna Creek, and the Kenai River. He will also be instructing students on different aspects of the watershed.

We have the dates set for our end of the year Peterson Bay field trip (May 4th, 5th, and 6th). This will be a three day, two night excursion across Kachemak Bay from Homer and is a culmination of invertebrate and coastal ecosystem study. It will be $140 for each student so please begin planning accordingly. We also have a Challenger Learning Center Mission upcoming in December, Community Group work third quarter, and an Alyeska trip planned for late March. Enjoy the fall and change of seasons!

I am very excited beginning a new school year. I had a great summer; worked a bit, played a bit, and had friends visit. I hope all of you had a fun and restful summer. Working in my room is boring without the students. I was so very excited to see our returning students and how much they have grown (I’ve seen a few of you this summer). I’m also pumped about our new 4th grade students, they have been great these first three days! Next week, we will continue getting to know each other, practice learning routines, and students will be taking assessments. Please remember to check this blog often for information about weekly assignments, workplans, reading logs, newsletters, schedules, calendars and links, etc.- you can find it all here. I made an easy link address for our class blog. It is;

http://tinyurl.com/Mr-Faris

Ready for some fun, glorious, learning adventures? Our first big adventure will be an overnight trip to the KNWR Outdoor Education Center out near Swanson River on September 21st and 22nd. Students will be learning “Leave No Trace” principles from Mrs. Ostrowski and myself. Come join us as a volunteer/chaperone! Thank you so much for sharing/entrusting your children with me- I feel blessed.

Congratulations to our 6th grade students: Keegan, Kaylee, Faith, Sean, Anchor, Sergio, Ysabelle and Nathan! I will miss you immensely. I will remember how you lead this class, showed us how to listen, work, interact, share, and concentrate. Most importantly, these students set an encouraging, positive classroom environment. 6th graders, your dreams are there for the taking- work hard, show persistence and achieve them!

Mr. Faris

So many things have happened this busy third quarter! I would say we are most proud of how students helped in our community with community groups. They come to an end this week and it is bittersweet. The 5th grade students and I will certainly miss Mr. Jim and all of the people at the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank. The students loved helping out. I’m sure the 4th and 6th grade students will miss the people and connections they have made at the Soldotna Senior Center and Riverside House.

On a positive note, our school made 700+ “Bean Soup Mix” kits for the Food Bank yesterday. It was a real team effort; students, families, teachers, staff, the Food Bank and Peterkin Distributors. We couldn’t have done it without the efforts of our staff- THANK YOU! A special thanks to Ms. Sanders, Bob Shirley, Dallas Hansen, and Cody Quelland. Shall we shoot for 1,000 next year??????

We are going to go ice-fishing next week. Probably our last field trip until Peterson Bay as Alyeska skiing looks more and more Unlikely. We also have our Read-A-Thon next Thursday: a great way for students to raise money for field trips. Spring Break comes the week of March 9th, and students are ready for a break. Fourth quarter will be upon us and busy with state testing (Alaska Measures of Progress) or AMP testing. It will all be computer based- a first for Alaska. We’ll have some research writing going on, some marine biology prep, and of course end of the year activities.

A very Happy New Year to all. Our school year seems to be flying. We are beginning our comunity projects this third quarter. We will be splitting students into their respective grade levels and working at different locations (4th– Senior Center, 5th– Food Bank, 6th– Riverside House). Students will be visiting these places once a week to work, learn, and interact with people in our community. This program will help students learn many valuable lessons; responsibility, compassion, citizenship, etc. If you would like to help out and attend please contact me. We will be going every Tuesday and Thursday from about 12-1:30pm.

Our writing focus for the third quarter is persuasive or opinion writing. We will also finish up our colonial/revolutionary war studies with a simulation. From there students will begin to learn about physiology, particularly human physiology.

We are going ahead with our field trip to Alyeska. We are going the week after spring break, date to be determined. There will be more sunlight by then and hopefully some snow!. We will certainly need help with chaperones. Please think about beginning to put some money aside for this trip and for our Peterson Bay trip at the end of the year. We will try and do some fund-raising for them, but both are costly.

Thanks so much for your support; this is a great group of students.

Can’t believe this school year is going so fast! I’d like to thank all of you for coming to our parent teacher conferences. I am blessed to be able to work with your children. We have a busy December coming up, so please check out our calendar and the most recent newsletter for detailed information.

We do have Santa’s Secret Shop coming on the 8th and 9th of December. The week of the 15th we will have Secret Santa in our class with students that would like to participate, more info about it to come next week. December 17th is a big field trip day; 5/6 grade students go to the Challenger Center, while the 4th grade students will go to the FAA Tower, and Kenai Airport. On the 18th we will go Christmas caroling with a primary class in the morning.

Coming up third quarter (after the Holiday Break), we will begin our community group projects. 4th grade students will be going to the Soldotna Senior Center, 5th graders will go to the Food Bank, and 6th graders will be going to a senior citizen care facility. We certainly could use help with the 5th grade group; we’ll be driving to the Food Bank on Tuesdays and Thursdays from @ 12-1:20.

Last years group at the Food Bank

Wow, we’ve got two big field trips under our belts already! We had an amazing OEC overnight field trip (though soggy). We also rafted the Upper Kenai River. I’d like to thank all of the paents who made these trips possible; especially the chaperones donating their time to make these outdoor learning experiences possible.

This class is wonderful so far, very positive and supportive of each other! We are halfway through the first quarter and most students are becoming very successful at completing their work. They are learning to produce quality work as well. Our writing focus is on narrative writing this quarter, and students are currently writing a descriptive story about their rafting experience.

I hope everyone had a great spring break; I know it was restful for our family and kids. We have a busy end of the year. Our first week back we travel to Alyeska Wednesday, March 19th. We will leave school around 7:15 am and return to school about 7 pm. We also have a school assembly our first Friday back, and a flag folding ceremony.

The first week of April we have state benchmark testing; all students need to be at school and on time please. The second week in April we have AM camps (dance, art, or science) while the MMUN students are gone. Friday, April 11th all intermediate students will go to the Nikiski Pool. Our intermediate music concert will be the evening of April 24th.

In May, as we wind down our school year, 6th grade students will have swimming lessons and boot camp during the first two weeks of the month. Finally our class will go to Peterson Bay on a two-night field trip the last full week of school (14th-16th). 6th grade graduation will be held on Wednesday, May 21st. Hold on tight, it will go very quickly! Thanks for all of your help and support.