Hello Middle School families. It is my hope that your students came home this past week and had nothing but great things to say about the start of the new year. I know their teachers were feeling super positive and energized. The picture attached to this memo was written by one of our 6th grade students during an Advisory activity, Sidewalk chalk Hopes and Dreams.
It was so fun to watch some of you taking videos of your children as they got out of your cars. I don’t even think we had a student miss the bus this past week. That is AWESOME.
Speaking of buses… We are not yet ready to let students ride buses home that are not their assigned bus. Some of our buses are very crowded and the bus company needs to see how things all shake out in the first month of school. I will ask again in a few weeks.
Advisory Corner: I walked around on Friday before students left and asked them what they thought about Advisory and Why.
Student quotes:
Grade 7
I like advisory. In my advisory class we have a tennis ball named Bernard as our mascot.
Not a big fan, would rather have WIN. WIN was better bc we can do homework
I like it more than WIN block. I like not jumping right into Science
It’s nice to have a place to go in the morning
Smaller class
It’s neat to talk to people more
Grade 6.
I really like it. It's a smaller class and I can really get to know people and teachers.
Fun, good,
I like Mr. Putnam’s attitude he’s really fun and nice
Grade 5
Fun activities getting to know everybody a little bit more.
I like my teacher. She's fun and nice. I like advisory because we don’t have to do school work in it.
I like it because it's fun because I get to learn about my classmates.
Grade 8
I like it, it's cool. It’s nice to start the day in the same place.
It’s nice to have an early WIN block.
Small class
I like it. I like starting my day on an easier level , we get to settle into the day.
Book Fair:
We will be holding a book fair on September 18-22. Be on the lookout for more information from our Middle School PTO. We will be looking for volunteers to help set up and sell books.
Reminders:
Middle School Play:
This coming Fall, the Drama Club, in conjunction with Groton-Dunstable Community Education, will be holding auditions for Matilda Jr. Auditions will be held on September 12 and 13, and are open to all Middle school students. Registration will be open the first week in September. Rehearsals will be held Monday through Friday after school in the PAC, and will culminate in performances on November 18 and 19. Matilda Jr will involve lots of hard work, excellent collaboration, and an enjoyable show! Please contact Lorien Corbelletti with any questions at lcorbelletti@gdrsd.org. This information is also on our website.
Chromebooks GDRMS is a 1-1 chromebook school. We are asking all of our students to fill out our Chromebook policy agreement. When it is time for MCAS students will need to use a school issued device. We want our families to know that the district has, with great effort and expense, provided equal access to technology for all students. When we are using all of our devices we can be sure we have good Internet speed and connectivity. Part of our ability to achieve this with a small staff is uniform hardware, managed by the tech team. This enables us to widely employ best practices (needed in any large network) as well as the ability to track abuse and violations. Personal devices circumvent some of these sound principles. A student Chromebook owned by GDRSD is essentially sandboxed. Meaning they cannot log into any other domain other than GDRSD. They cannot add any extensions, apps, or add ons that we (or Google) do not seem safe. With outside devices that is not the case, we do not have control over the device, which limits our ability to troubleshoot and get a student up and running quickly. All this being said, we encourage our students to use our GDRSD devices.
Dates to remember:
Picture Day 9/9
Open house 9/22
Parent Conferences 11/16 ½ day afternoon conferences, 11/17 ½ day evening conferences March 17th ½ day parent conferences.
Sincerely your Groton Dunstable Regional Middle School Principal
Wendy Salvatore wsalvatore@gdrsd.org