Your advanced ILA Summer Reading Assignments and Activities are below.  Your books are in the Middle School Office to borrow. 
Mrs. Donovan's 6th Grade Assignment (for incoming 6th graders in 2009-2010)
Mrs. Harris's 7th Grade Assignment (for incoming 7th graders in 2009-2010)
Mrs. McDermott's 8th Grade Assignment (for incoming 8th graders in 2009-2010)

NCTE and Read-Write-Think have put together great activities, podcasts, websites for students of all ages to explore reading and writing this summer.  Please go to: http://www.readwritethink.org/beyondtheclassroom/summer/ to see these materials.

K-12 Online Conference 2008
Description: "The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008."

For a quick overview of 21st Century Learning Skills see Jackie Gerstein's overview.  Also, review her page on Trends for 21st K-12 Education.  Dr. Scott McLeod (widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading academic experts on K-12 school technology leadership issues) has created a very interesting video on 21st Century Education entitled "Shift Happens."  Click here to view the video.

The Northfield Community School K-8 2008 Mathematics Curriculum is now entirely online!  Please click the second link to the right.

Attached is the Curriculum Office's Summer 2008 Newsletter.  In it you will find current information from our curriculum office, as well as summer and fall professional development opportunities in-district.
Enjoy!
Click here for Summer 2008 Newsletter!

As part of our ongoing assessment of our professional learning community, our Professional Development Committee surveyed our faculty about the quality of our study groups.  Click here for the survey results.

Do you need to brush up on your typing skills?  Try Peter's Online Typing Course!

Review of site*:

"CONTENT:
This site was created by Peter Hudson, Web developer and teacher, and provides free, online typing lessons and exercises for beginning typists.

SITE DESIGN:
The site has a simple easy to follow format with the links grouped into three categories (Preliminaries, Lessons and Exercises) that are listed in the left sidebar. Adobe Flash Player is required and can be downloaded from the site.
 
REVIEW:
Students, teachers or anyone interested in increasing their typing skills will find this site helpful. The site is self described as a place for "beginning typists and frustrated hunt-and-peckers who want to move from four-finger typing to full-blown touch typing." Users will want to begin with the "preliminaries" that provide information on how to use the course, typing ergonomics and principles of typing. The lessons begin with the basics of home row, top row or QWERT, bottom row and numbers row. The final section deals with exercises to train the fingers and improve accuracy and speed."

*Review of site is by Education World.

Thinkfinity.org has developed many activities and resources for summer enrichment in math, science, reading and more.  Go to the Parent page and scroll down to Highlights! 

Click here for the in-service agenda for April 18, 2008.  

Parents and Teachers - What kind of Cyber Guide are you?  Take this PBS online quiz.

SUPER MONDAY!!!  (CLICK FOR PODCAST)

On Monday, February 4, NCS 5th-8th grade students will vote in a special primary election! This event caps off a month of Election Review integrated into the curriculum! In Language Arts, every middle school student (5-8) has been busy writing a persuasive letter to their favorite presidential candidates on issues that are important to us at NCS - environment and poverty (homelessness). They have invited candidates to come speak to us on these issues. All 550+ letters have been mailed and emailed! Wow! They also learned about the candidates through websites that we provided (announcement below).

1/28/08 - Will they come?  In Language Arts, every middle school student has been busy writing a letter to their favorite presidential candidates on issues that are important to us at NCS - environment and poverty (homelessness).  They have invited candidates to come speak to us on these issues.  All 550+ letters have been mailed and emailed!  Wow.  They also learned about the candidate through websites that I provided (see Lesson Plan) and also Mr. Vain found a great "Pick you Candidate" survey for our students.  He is first polling students for their choice, asking them to go the Candidates website, taking the quiz (discussing the topics) and then polling the students again for their choice.  Did it change?  Let's wait to find out!

I have added a new NCS Curriculum and Technology Project web page that feature our current projects such as the Math Curriculum Committee and our upcoming Visual Literacy Fair.  In addition, workshop content is on this page!  Click here to check it out!  (http://NCS.district.googlepages.com/ )

12/19/07 and 1/03/08

If you missed our workshop with loads of technology integration material, please visit our online workshop and resources for Technology Rich Teaching!

Important!!!!!

Update: New Jersey's New State Assessments: A Summary of New Test Design and Administrative Features for Grades 5 – 8. Posted by NJDOE on 11/16/07

New! Spring Curriculum Newsletter (April 2008)

Fall Curriculum Newsletter (Nov. 2007) 

Also see Summer Curriculum Newsletter.  Also Please review the dates for each link on the right - they are constantly updated!  Make sure you review educational resources and PD opportunities (for brief overview of PD opportunities - see calendar!)

A new brief from the Harvard Family Research Project stresses the importance of parent involvement in their middle and high school students' education. See article for more details:  http://tinyurl.com/35p7rn

This is a great website to review over the summer!  It is everything you ever wanted to know about blogs - with an amazing amount of resources:  http://www3.essdack.org/socialstudies/blogs.htm

Learning Planet - a wealth of online activities and games for students, lesson plans - searchable by grade, subject area, teacher tools and much, much more!!!

4Teachers - an amazing site for technology integration, online tools, many resources.  You MUST check out teacher tackler and project based learning checklist tool that you modify based on your project!!!

Check out the File Cabinet resource, a series of cabinets with lessons for every subject area!

Great online newspaper and magazine, free registration.

Go to: http://www.edweek.org/ew/index.html

2007-2010 NCS Technology Plan

Spring 2008 Newsletter

Homework Tips - How Parents Can Help

Curriculum Revision and Textbook Purchasing Cycle

Fall 2007 Curriculum Newsletter

Parent Involvement = Student Success

2007 Summer Professional Development

writing to the candidate