Academy of Our Lady home page link:

http://www.academyofourlady.org/ 

    On a personal note look  for my nephew, Garrett Weber-Gale on the Beijing Olympic site. He won two Gold medals at the Olympics. One in the 4x100m free relay and 4x100m medley relay. He also qualified for the semifinals in the 100 and 50 m freestyle individual.

Welcome Back!

        We are doing a lot with Microsoft Word and the proper setup of documents. MLA standards are being followed; these include 1" margins on top bottom and sides as well as double spacing throughout the document.  Times New Roman with a size 12 font is standard, paragraphs are tabbed 5 spaces there is one space after a period. When you do a work cited page go to format, paragraph and under "special" choose hanging and make sure you have 0.5 for the spacing. A Work cited/bibliography page is double spaced and it is always strict alphabetical order.  All papers should be printed on white paper with black ink. Check out the link to "The Owl at Purdue" (see "Links" page) for all your formatting questions.

        The 8th grade yearbook staff has once again turned out a great yearbook. I am looking forward to the incoming 8th so see what new ideas they bring to the table. Looking at the 3 we have published in house so far they are all very unique! If you have not seen the 2005-2006,   2006-2007, and 2007-2008 yearbooks be sure to stop by and see copies. They came out fantastic and the students did a great job putting them together. Most of the pictures in the yearbook were taken by the 8th graders using the school's  Sony digital still camera. Pictures were taken, downloaded to the Dell XPS 600 desktop, edited and sorted by the 8th grade. They used Microsoft Publisher to compile the finished product which was then sent to a local printer. 

        All classes will be working in the various Microsoft Office 2003 programs: Word, Excel, Power Point and Publisher. 

        The children come into the computer class every week for a full 40 minute period. All students K - 8 have classes as well as the PreK enrichment program for 4 year olds. This year there were 19 four year olds who participated. The PreK also met with our Spanish teacher Mrs. Leonard who gave them a Spanish word of the week, we often typed that word with an accompanying picture in computer class. 

      Mrs. Mason runs the Literary Club and I am privileged to work with her on the Literary Magazine. The 2008 magazine is completed. It came out great with pretty much every student contributing! Next year we are probably sending it to a printer as it really is quite large! Thank you mothers who made the copying and collating possible. The homeroom teachers  supervised the creation and editing of the contributions and students entered their contributions in the computer classroom. All work is done in Microsoft Publisher. 

      Mavis Beacon is the typing program used by the upper grades, the lower grades are using  Disney Typing. The "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego" program is up and running in the computer lab.

        Always looking to enrich our curriculum we have some great math programs that are being used and enjoyed by all the classes. My Mathematical Life is especially popular with the upper grades. Math Essentials, multiplication and division or addition and subtraction are also great programs.  New program purchases are on a temporary hold as we are looking to the future and are waiting to see how the Vista operating system will support any software we may purchase.

        Please check out this site often to see what each grade level will be working on throughout the year. You should also keep viewing the individual teacher's sites as we are encouraging a lot of interdisciplinary projects.  

        Looking forward to another great year!

        Need to set up a bibliography or work cited page? This is a great site! http://www.noodletools.com/index.html   Just go to the site, under Free Tools go to Noodle Bib Express, be sure to click on MLA for standards.  At the top of the page it prompts "I am citing a(n)": click on the down arrow next to  "Select your citation type", choose your media, click go,  and follow the prompts.