Weekly Update 1/6/12 by Kevin, Jake, Matthew, and Lucas

Starting this week, different Community Project groups will be blogging each week to update everyone on our progress.  This week's bloggers represent the Food Pantry groups.  

Group 1 includes  Matthew, Jake, Morgan, Gina, and Sammi.  

Group 2 includes Lucas, Kevin, Jasmine, Josh, and Hannah

Jake, Lucas, Matthew, and Kevin with a few of our donations.

The problem we identified in the Arlington Heights community is that the Wheeling Township Pantry gets low on food after the holidays.  We are trying to reverse the process right now by having a food drive at Thomas from Jan. 3-13.  To plan the food drive we talked to Mr. Kaye to get permission to have the drive and to ask what dates would be good.  Then we emailed Mrs. Hernandez at the pantry to ask for permission to collect food and to ask her what food they need the most.  We also looked on the website to get a list of foods.  Once we got permission we made posters and flyers and hung them up around the school.  Mr. Kelly helped us film a video for the morning announcements.  We also put the flyer below in the Friday packet.  This week and next week during homeroom we are going to every classroom to collect donations and remind people about the drive.  So far we have over 200 items!  We feel proud (but not arrogant) about this project.

IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO DONATE!!

The all-school Geography Bee was held during Advisory on Thursday.  Kyle represented Sigma and did a great job on some tough questions.  Josh was Sigma's runner-up.  Congratulations to both of them!

Here we are having fun pretending to be a Greek chorus in drama.  We learned that Greek choruses all said their lines together until Thespis came along and individual actors said lines.

In social studies, we used Inspiration to connect what we learned about Sumerian civilization to American civilization today.  Here are two examples of what we decided we would include in our own Museum of American Civilization.

In science we are doing image podcasts on smell topics we have picked to do further research on.  Some of our topics include weight loss, mosquitoes and smart phones.  How do these topics relate to our sense of smell?  Stay tuned to find out!

In math, in addition (pun intended) to learning about multiplying and dividing monomials and negative exponents, we have also started a roller coaster math project where we will design our own coaster for an amusement park.