Rocket Mania

Greetings all, I'm back from my brief (very brief) trip up to Northern California this weekend. I flew up on Saturday morning with one of Southwest's 49 dollar fun fares and then drove back down with my girlfriend on Sunday afternoon. We took highway 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz which let us enjoy at least a small bit of the trip. As most of you have probably heard, we'll be kicking off Rocket Week tomorrow with an hour devoted to letting the students build their rockets in preparation of launches on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The fundamental concept behind Rocket Week is to expose the students to the Scientific Method, therefore it will be critical that the students take time after school and at home to make adjustments to their rocket after each launch. Hopefully, for some of you this will prove to be an opportunity to spend some fun crafty time with your student in an exciting pursuit. Next week we'll be devoting our math time to analyzing and representing the data the students collect from their launches this week, so make sure to inquire about their final conclusions and data representations after next week if you remember. Speaking of the math, in lieu of the recent schedule change for Free Market Friday from every fourth week to every sixth week, Colleen and I have had to adjust our mathematics curriculum schedule. The result is an additional quiz scheduled to take place two weeks after the first quiz and two weeks before each test. Although I dislike the idea of having a test only every sixth week instead of every four, I think the schedule can succeed for the students with the inclusion of a second quiz. Whether this second quiz will be the same as the first or more comprehensive we haven't discussed yet and I suppose we won't have an answer until we can get a better picture of where the students are at the time, but I think this new schedule will end up working out well for us. -Mr. H