October Newsletter

Oct. 3: VB League Tournament 9am

Oct. 3: FB vs. Lexington Trails 9am

Oct. 5: Candy Bar Fundraiser begins

Oct. 6: FB vs. Forest Spring 4pm
Oct. 7: Dental Clinic

Oct. 8: XC @ Eudora 4pm

Oct. 14: PTC 4pm-8pm

Oct. 15: No School

Oct. 16: No School

Oct. 19: 7th GBB @ Forest Spring 4pm

Oct. 19: 8th GBB vs. Forest Spring 4pm

Oct. 21: League Choir at Louisburg 2pm

Oct. 22: WR @ Spring Hill 4pm

Oct. 23: School Picture Retakes

Oct. 23: Winter Sports Pictures 3pm

Oct. 26: 7th GBB @ Ottawa 4pm

Oct. 26: 8th GBB vs. Ottawa 4pm

Oct. 27: WR @ Paola 4pm

Oct. 29: 7th GBB vs. Louisburg 4pm

Oct. 29: 8th GBB @ Louisburg 4pm

Oct. 31: WR @ Tonganoxie 9am

All sporting events are $5 entry for adults and students K-12 per the Frontier League. Middle school students may enter games for free, as long as they present their student ID.

Before School: Doors open at 7:30 a.m.. School begins at 8:00 a.m.. Please have students arrive at 7:30 a.m. or after, as any students arriving prior to 7:30 a.m. will not be under supervision.

School Release: School ends at 3:00 p.m., students are asked to exit the building immediately unless working with an arranged teacher or have an activity/practice.

Home Sports/Activities: Students are not allowed to enter the gate until 3:30 p.m..

Attendance Reminder: If your student is absent, please notify the office as soon as possible.

Email: pms-attendance@usd368.org

Phone: (913)294-8030

Please see the attached document for all info for Girl's Basketball!

September was a busy month in 6th Grade Communications! Our students continued building their reading, writing, speaking, and critical-thinking skills, and we packed a lot of learning into the month!

Literary Elements
Students explored the important pieces that make a story work, including characters, setting, plot, conflict, theme, and characterization. We practiced looking beyond the words on the page and using evidence to better understand characters, their actions, and how all the pieces of a story work together.

Remembering September 11th
As part of our 9/11 Remembrance activities, students had the opportunity to observe, listen, and interview someone who remembers September 11, 2001. This gave students a chance to hear history from someone who experienced that day while practicing their interviewing, listening, and communication skills. Thank you to the family members and friends who helped make this meaningful activity possible!

Up Next: Becoming Fantasy Co-Authors!
As we wrap up our Literary Elements unit, we are moving into our first major writing piece of the year, Fantasy Narrative Writing! But there is a twist! Instead of creating an entire story from scratch, students are stepping into the role of co-author. They will be given the beginning of a fantasy story and challenged to help the author finish it! Students will have to carefully consider what has already been established in the story and use their creativity to continue the plot. They will apply what they have learned about characters, setting, conflict, plot, dialogue, and descriptive language to create a story that makes sense while still making the story their own.

Here’s to another month of learning adventures!

Mrs. Melton

6th Grade Communications

Our 8th graders wrapped up a Grammar Unit, and they tackled some skills that helped make their writing clearer, stronger, and more interesting!

During the unit, students worked with:

• Verbals – Students explored gerunds, participles, and infinitives and learned how these verb forms could do different jobs in a sentence.
• Active & Passive Voice – Students learned how changing the voice of a sentence could shift the focus and create different effects in their writing. They practiced identifying who was doing the action and who was receiving it.
• Verb Moods – Students worked with indicative, imperative, interrogative, conditional, and subjunctive moods. They learned how verbs could show facts, commands, questions, possibilities, and wishes.
• Comma Detectives – Students became punctuation detectives as they practiced identifying where commas belonged—and, most importantly, why they belonged there!
• Ellipses… – Students learned how those three little dots could show an omission, a pause, or an unfinished thought.
• — Dashes — Students also explored how dashes could interrupt a sentence, add emphasis, or provide extra information.

Grammar Wasn’t Just Worksheets!

Throughout the unit, students practiced these skills through games, challenges, sentence investigations, and grammar mysteries. The goal was more than memorizing rules—it was learning how writers used grammar and punctuation to make their writing more effective.

By the end of the unit, students had more tools in their grammar toolbox and were ready to put those skills to work in their writing!

8th graders in art have finished working on their clay projects and have started their paper mache mask project! Students are creating plaster molds of their faces, which will serve as the base for their masks. From there, they use cardboard and paper mache to build unique features and add ons. Students have the freedom to design their masks however they want, allowing them to get creative and make each mask completely their own.

Seventh grade Coding students recently put their growing programming skills to work by designing and creating their own Catch Games in Scratch. Students began with the basic challenge of programming a game in which a player moves an object to catch items falling from above. From there, they made the games their own by choosing themes, designing characters and backgrounds, and adding features to improve gameplay.

Creating a working game required much more than simply putting blocks of code together. Students had to break a larger problem into smaller pieces, determine how different parts of their programs should interact, test their ideas, and make changes when something did not work as expected. Along the way, they practiced important coding concepts including variables, conditionals, loops, coordinates, and event-driven programming.

Perhaps the most important skills students practiced were critical thinking and perseverance. Code rarely works perfectly on the first attempt! Students learned to examine their programs, identify possible causes of problems, test solutions, and continue working through frustration. Each successful fix represented not only a working piece of code, but also the development of problem-solving skills that extend far beyond the computer screen.

By the end of the project, students had transformed an idea into a playable game while discovering an important lesson about computer science: mistakes are not failures—they are problems waiting to be solved.

Eighth grade Coding students have taken their programming skills off the computer screen and into the physical world with the introduction of mBot2 robots. Students began by assembling the robots themselves, learning how the different components fit together and discovering that successful robotics requires both careful construction and computer programming.

Once their robots were assembled, students began learning how to program them to move. What sounds like a simple task quickly became an exercise in critical thinking. Students had to consider direction, speed, timing, distance, and turns while translating their ideas into instructions the robot could understand. They programmed their robots to complete increasingly complex movement challenges and then tested whether their code produced the results they expected.

Of course, robots do not always cooperate! Students encountered connection issues, unexpected movement, construction problems, and programs that behaved differently than intended. Rather than treating these challenges as failures, students learned to troubleshoot. They examined both their code and their robots, tested possible solutions, made adjustments, and tried again.

The robotics unit has provided students with hands-on opportunities to practice programming while strengthening critical thinking, perseverance, debugging, and collaborative problem-solving skills. Each challenge reinforces one of the most important lessons in coding and engineering: when something does not work, the next step is not to give up—it is to figure out why.

The choirs had a successful choir concert on Wednesday evening

Congratulations to the Star Panthers for August:

6th Graders - Brielle Baldridge, Madden Goode, Logan Kuntz

7th Graders - Maisie Burkhart, Jerzey Logan, Hudson Needham

8th Graders - Alex Doherty, Averly Green, Kian Sanders

Star Panthers for September:

6th Graders - Hudson Gray, Cade Rogers, Everly Shinkle

7th Graders - Juliana Baldridge, Brock Davey, Piper Heinrich

8th Graders - Layla Canales, Morgan Johnson, Mason Sparks

Peers helping students learn to measure wet ingredients!

7th Grade Varsity traveled to Eudora on Saturday 9/12 for the Eudora Invitational and brought back some hardware! Congrats Panthers on your 2nd place finish!

Congratulations to our August Students of the Month!

Jaxson Best, Jaxon Viers, Harper Sterk, Kylie Caviness, Arya Walker, Cherokee Grosskreutz, Declan Antwine, and Preston Himpel.

(not pictured, McKenzie Slattery and Tyson Smail)

Congratulations to Mr. Chris Post, for being August's Staff Member of the Month!

Congratulations to Mrs. Angela Kendrick for being September's Staff Member of the Month!

We appreciate our custodians and everything they do for us!

When: October 13 and 23, 3-4 p.m.

What: Plastic Canvas Magnets with Halloween/Fall themes

Where: Room 217 (Reading Lab)

Bring: Yourself and a positive, learning attitude!

Fundraiser ends Monday October 5th.