St. James classes were offered the opportunity to do a community service project with the residents at Cornerstone Retirement Community. We painted all different types of rocks with the residents, which will then be placed all over the community. This is part of a larger "Spread the Kindness" project, and each rock has our school hashtag and instructions to post a picture of the rocks on Facebook. The kids thoroughly enjoyed painting with the residents. They showed impressive creative skills as well as practiced their manners and social skills with the residents. Everyone had a really great time!

Another fun October activity for the 6th grade has been our unit of study on ancient Egypt. Our Egyptian Fair is coming up soon, and I will save most details of this amazing event for my next post. However, since today is Halloween, I will share one fun science activity we did in our Egypt unit. Mummification is one of ancient Egypt's most well-known rituals. In studying the reasons behind this, the process, and the procedure, we mummified apple slices in different combinations of salts. We applied the scientific method and went through the process of hypothesizing, researching, observing, and concluding. Most of the class felt that iodized salt and Epsom salt preserved the apples the best. What a fun and hands-on way to study something that's actually kind of gross!

Lastly, our class took their 6th-grade field trip to Mo-Ranch in Hunt, Texas, last week. It was such a fantastic leadership and bonding experience. This class made memories together that they will always cherish. Mo-Ranch is definitely one of the special things St. James has to offer our 6th graders.

What a fun first day of school! The sixth grade enjoyed the solar eclipse with the whole campus, then cooled off with some popsicle treats. The new sixth graders have stepped right in and are doing a great job with their new responsibilities. They are very serious about caring for our flags and putting them up and taking them down daily. They have worked very hard to learn how to properly set up and lead Big Chapel on Tuesdays. We are the leaders of the school and make major efforts to set a good example and be kind to the younger kids. A lot is expected of sixth graders at St. James!

Viewing the eclipse was a great way to begin our first unit in science, which is solar energy. We traced our own shadows at different times of the day, as well as graphed data from a shadow tracking device we built. This is an active and visual way to study how the earth moves around the sun. The next element in our unit is solar heat. 

We're off to a great start, it's going to be an awesome year!