Welcome

Welcome to our newsletter. This is the quickest way for parents to find out what's going on in their child's class. You can get directly to the newsletters by saving the address www.mr-skipper.com/newsletters. I update the Parent Newsletter each month and the weekly newsletters contain the daily agendas or the students. The website, Mr. Skipper dot Com, goes in to much more detail and is used for direct instruction with the students. I spend the summer making the site more mobile friendly, so you will see more links to outside documents (Google Drive) than before. Hopefully, that will not cause problems.

There are two nice features to this newsletter. At the top is a translate button which will allow you to read the page in any desired language, and to the left is a Table of Contents to better help you locate the information you seek. To see the table of contents, I had to reduce the screen size on my desktop and, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to show up on the mobile version.

These are the rules I give to the students on the first day of class.

He started teaching Encounters at Woodland Acres Middle School in 2017. When he's not teaching, Mr. Skipper likes to read, camp, and hike.

Critical Thinking - Both Encounters 7 and Encounters 8 complete persuasive writing assignments using the ThinkCERCA program. Each assignment usually takes a week of class time, plus time outside of class.

It's always good to have your own supplies, and most GT students do. However, if you're missing something, we always have plenty of pencils, markers, scissors, etc. in our classroom.

If you are interested in volunteering at your child’s school, please complete an official background check by clicking on the 'Sign Up To Be A Volunteer' link below. This must be completed before you are eligible to volunteer at any Galena Park ISD campus or to chaperone any field trips.

Thank you in advance for doing your part to help Galena Park ISD achieve our mission of preparing our students to become productive citizens and lifelong learners. We appreciate you!

Sign up to be a volunteer; it is easy!

Sign Up To Be A Volunteer

This year, students will complete the majority of their writing by hand using pencil and paper. Drafting, revising, and editing will take place in their binders, encouraging focus, ownership, and active engagement in the writing process. Only final, polished drafts will be typed on the computer. This approach reduces digital distractions, reinforces the discipline of careful revision, and ensures that technology is used for presentation rather than composition. By grounding the writing process in pencil and paper, students develop stronger habits of attention and revision, while still producing final drafts that meet modern expectations for digital submission.

Advanced RLA (Reading/ Language Arts) is taught at a high school level, and since I taught high school for 20 years, mostly 9th grade, I'm pretty well-suited to prepare them for high school. Many of my former students tell me that they find 9th-grade English easier than their peers do.

In Advanced RLA, I give my students the opportunity to improve the skills they already possess in reading, writing, editing, and revising. All of them should have scored "Meets" or better on the 7th grade reading STAAR test. Our goal is for those who scored Masters to stay at Masters and those who scored Meets to move to Masters on their 8th-grade test.

This year, students will go beyond the traditional 8th grade reading list by studying advanced works such as Emerson and Thoreau. These texts challenge students to engage with complex ideas and language, helping them develop as independent, critical readers.

You can view the class calendar at any time by visiting www.mr-skipper.com/calendar.

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• email: lskipper@galenaparkisd.com