Spartans' Playoff Schedule!

Spartan Nation, the football team's playoff run begins this Saturday bright and early at 9am at St. Paul High School in Santa Fe Springs. All football players MUST meet at St. Jerome School at 7:30am so we can caravan there together. (Contact Mr. B if for some reason you can't meet at school ASAP.) All of our great fans are more than welcome to join in the caravan out to St. Paul as well. If/When we win, our next game will take place Sunday at 12 noon at St. John Bosco High School in Bellflower. The team(s) we play Sunday play right after us on Saturday, so you might want to stay for a little bit and get a feel for the opposition! There is $4 admission fee for adults and $1 for children. The full bracket can be found at http://www.cyousa.org/ and click on the flaf football link.

Here are the directions to St. Paul High School: 405 South to the 105 East to the 605 North (stay on the 605 for almost 3 miles); Take exit #12 Telegraph Road and head toward "Telegraph Road East" (for about 2.5 miles); Turn left on Greenleaf Avenue, St. Paul is at
9635 GREENLEAF AVE , SANTA FE SPRINGS 90670

Sunday's game at St. John Bosco is even easier to reach. Take the 405 South to the 105 East and exit Bellflower Blvd (just before the 605 interchange). Make a right on Bellflower and the school will be on the left hand side at 13640 Bellflower Blvd.

Come out and support the Spartans in your red and black! Mr. B and Mrs. Cobbs still have shirts available for $10 each. Any students joining the crowd can earn a few bonus points for attending the playoff games! See you there, GOOOOOOOOOOO SPARTANS!

Vocabulary Preparation

8th graders, a key element of your high school entrance exam and future academic success is vocabulary. One of the keys to achievement in this area is knowledge of root words, prefixes and suffixes. Our Literature books do an excellent job of presenting these "meanings" and providing solid vocabulary words from the stories and poems we read. In addition to these two provisions, we will also be adding a "word of the day" exercise to each class session. In order to make this a learning experience while maintaining enough class time for grammar, writing, and literary analysis, we will be creating vocabulary workbooks. Each workbook will consist of five sections: 1) vocabulary from our readings; 2) word of the day; 3) prefixes; 4) suffixes; 5) root words. It will be your responsibility to "study" these words and word parts; ask your parents to review them with you.

Each week you will be assigned a set of pages from the textbook that provides information on roots, prefixes, and/or suffixes. You will be required to write that information into the appropriate section of your workbook.

Each day at the start of class you will need to copy into your workbook the word of the day exercise and have them completed by the following Monday.

Depending on the stories read during the course of a week, you will receive a "spelling list" on a Monday that will include vocabulary words which you will be tested on the following Friday for spelling and vocabulary knowledge (like we have already been doing this year).

The vocabulary workbooks will be graded on a bi-weekly basis using a basic rubric similar to Mr. Ortega's interactive notebook. To check up on your progress/comprehension we will play some review games like "Cake Walk Comprehension," "Bingo," and "Jeopardy."

Please have your workbooks created no later than Monday, October 29th.

Important Football Update

Attention all Spartans football players (and families)! This Saturday's game against St. Anthony has switched locations to Meadows Park in Manhattan Beach - we will NOT play at Loyola this week. The game will still take place at 9am; players need to arrive no later than 8:30am. Sunday's 3:00 game against St. Bernadette will also take place at Meadows Park as planned. Meadows Park is located at 1200 North Meadows Ave. Take Sepulveda South past Rosecrans and the mall. Turn left on Manhattan Beach Blvd and left on Meadows. The parking lot is behind the school.

Remember, we play this weekend to end the regular season as undefeated league champions! Please come out ready to cheer on the boys as they attempt to reach a goal we have been working towards since mid-August.

Newberry Reports