Middle School

From the Counselor

by Rick Weatherholt

March 11, 2008

It is hard to believe that we are less than three months away from the end of the school year. As I get older the years go faster. It has been a very fast and productive year so far and we have a lot yet to accomplish. We have just finished the Strength Explorer pilot project with the 7th graders last week. Your child may have mentioned some of the things that were happening in Mr. Marroquin's classroom related to this project. In my last newsletter I described the Strength Explorer program and the purpose for doing it. I think it is a positive program and will benefit our students at Seward Middle School.

There are also some exciting things that we are going to be doing this spring at Seward Middle School. Here are some of the things that we are looking forward to.

BULLY RESISTANCE TEAM PRESENTATIONS

We have formed a team of six, seventh graders at Seward Middle School who have been working on the issue of bullying. This group of students calls themselves the Bully Resistance Team. They are Sarah Moody, Austin Fehlhafer, Trey Barnes, Abbey Rumery, Erin Miller, and Johnny Kamprath.

These students went to a workshop back in November that helped give them the information and training necessary to help other middle school students deal with the issue of bullying. Now they are taking this training a step further and they have been giving presentations to our Toptimes. They allow the other students to witness actual bullying in action by doing skits. They then talk about the different types of bullying and what can be done to combat bullying, especially if you are a bystander and you witness the bullying. The Bully Resistance Team members developed all these skits and presentations themselves.

TERRA NOVA TESTING SET FOR MARCH 11-14

We will be giving the Terra Nova achievement test to all Seward Middle School students from March 11-14. The testing will take a total of four days. Each of those days will be organized so that the students will test for half a day and go to their regular classes for the other half.

NORRIS STUDENT EXCHANGE

Sixteen student council members from Seward Middle School are going to visit Norris Middle School on March 19. In exchange Norris will be sending sixteen of their student council members to visit us on March 26. The students will be matched up with a host and they will spend the day with that person. We want our students to see what a day would look like in another school. We think it will be a great experience for our kids. They are very excited to meet new students and see what a regular day is like at Norris Middle School.

5th GRADE SKILLS

In 5th grade skills we just got done talking about how to deal with criticism. We talked about how criticism is actually necessary sometimes and all criticism is not negative. Just recently we started to talk about teasing and bullying and how to react to certain situations when you get teased or bullied.