As a teacher, I will strive to provide a safe, supportive, nurturing environment where thorough, differentiated learning opportunities are available to each student. I strive to encourage students to be self sufficient students who consistently pursue to improve their own expectations. Students will BELIEVE in themselves, ACHIEVE to their fullest potential, and SUCCEED in the world.

6th Grade: Fraction Operations are being concentrated on for our computation skill. Lots of practice is being put into adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and solving algebraic fractions. 6th grade is enjoying our “Secret Millionaire’s Club” activities where we have been talking about, profits and loses, expenses, budgets, debt, down payments, and interest. They really enjoy learning about real world examples that deal with money. In science we have moved into volcanoes. Next week, we will be recreating our own volcanoes for a fun lab. Each group will use different ingredients and we will decide what combination of ingredients makes for the best volcano. For the very beginning of February we have such a fun treat, we will be winding our way up the San Bernardino Mountains to go to Astro*Camp for three days. We will be doing microgravity training, and learning about astronomy, magnetic fields, electricity, and some really great team building activities.

7th Grade: Graphs and Functions are well under way, from there we will move on to percentages, where we will learn how to make our money grow!!! As well as good decisions on interest rates, and small investments. From there we will go into multi step equations and inequalities to help us get ready for Algebra 1 in 8th Grade. Science is really the exciting time for seventh grade. We have dove into the world of SCIENCE FAIR. Each child has decided upon a truly unique topic that they have found exciting and interesting. We will be wrapping up this project on March 19 where we display the weeks of hard work that went in to our experiments. Luckily this is just in time to go to Catalina Island where we will literally dive into the ocean at the Catalina Island Marine Institution. We will spend three days exploring marine biology and life in the world beneath the ocean’s surface.

8th Grade: Wow! What can I say, my 8th grade science classes have been so much fun. They are working so hard. They have just completed midterms. We are moving beyond the world of chemical and physical changes, acids, bases, elements, the periodic table, atoms, and bonding so that we may rocket our way around outer space. We will discover new things about Earth, the sun, moons, stars, galaxies, and our Universe. About the second week of February we will be looking at the science behind rocket ships, testing our own engineering skills to build our own rockets.

Miss Brandt*