Author Jack Cheng Acknowledges Student Readers and Revisits Class
Last summer, seven of Mr Blatt’s 6th grade students read the manuscript for Jack Cheng’s forthcoming YA novel, The Many Mask of Andy Zhou. The group read the book before meeting with Jack on a hot July day. The students gave him excellent feedback, which Jack wrote down and used in his following draft. On Tuesday of this week, Jack hand delivered seven copies of the book prior to its June 6th release date for our final FMS book club meeting. Each copy of the book was signed with a custom drawing from Jack. Mr. Blatt said, "This was so special to the kids and me. Jack is a true writing talent—an artist really. [This was] so great to be included, and then so thoughtfully acknowledged." The class contribution to the writing process was included the end of the book in the acknowledgment section.
The acknowledgement reads, "To the beta readers from Mr. Blatt's ELA classes at Ferndale Middle School, AKA the Hi-Chew Crew. (Let's do that again!)"
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Wednesday night, three Ferndale Family groups dedicated to supporting the music and fine arts programs of the district held their first meetings of the 2023-24 school year. BandAid, Orch-Support and Fine Arts Boosters (FAB). Great ideas were shared, and members planned out a great year!
Social Justice students 6-8 working and supporting each other while reading the class book “New Kid” as part of our Identity lesson.
The Social Justice elective is a one semester course for middle school students to examine issues that impact diverse groups of people. The course begins with an introduction to what defines social justice and continues with a close look at disparities based on race, poverty and gender identification.
The book "New Kid" helps us to truly dive into the term "Identity". In this book there is an African American boy who attends a new school where everyone is very different from what he is used to. He faces many cultural battles with peers at school and teachers as he learns how to navigate a new environment while staying true to who he is. Students really enjoyed reading it!
Tink, a certified therapy dog, who lives with Mr Turner of FMS, made her first visit of the school year.
Tink, who is certified through the Bright and Beautiful Therapy Dogs, visits FMS on the 1st Friday of every month. Today, she was joined by one of her therapy pals, Annie, a pointer.
Be sure to stop by the FMS commons during lunch, or swing by room 301 to get some puppy love!
During Social Emotional Learning (SEL) sessions this week at FMS, several students learned to deal with frustration appropriately through play. While standing up the dominoes, sometimes they would fall, and students would have to start over. One student in Mrs. Collins class, Exzavior, demonstrated executive functioning skills by developing a harm reduction strategy: completing small sections at a time so that only a small section would fall if an accident occurred. Once the small sections were all set, students went back and carefully filled in the gaps with more dominoes. During the lesson, the dominoes accidentally fell many times, but everyone practiced walking away, deep breathing, talking about what was frustrating (including positive self-talk), before coming up with solutions.
