Our Christmas Movie:

The Ultimate Gift is the story of an extremely spoiled and self-centered young man named Jason who expects to inherit a fortune when his grandfather dies. Instead, Jason discovers that his grandfather has planned a series of activities that he must complete before he gets any inheritance. The activities are designed to help Jason learn that life itself is a many-faceted gift. Some of the twelve gifts Jason discovers include:

• The gift of work
• The gift of friends
• The gift of learning
• The gift of problems
• The gift of family
• The gift of laughter
• The gift of giving
• The gift of gratitude

In the end, Jason discovers that the Ultimate Gift is being able to give to others.

While the movie deviates slightly from the book, both carry excellent stewardship messages for young people. The book is only about 150 pages and extremely easy reading for older students. The beauty of the book is that students could read and reflect upon some of the stewardship messages that might be missed in the movie. Such powerful messages include:

• “The greatest gift anyone could be given is the awareness of all the gifts he or she already has.”
• “I thought that if you gave something away, someone else now possessed it, and you were left with less than you had before. In reality, when you give out of love, both the giver and the receiver have more than they started with.”
• “In those times when we yearn to have more in our lives, we should dwell on the things we already have. In doing so, we will often find that our lives are already full to overflowing.”

Each morning we gather around the Advent wreath and listen to the daily scripture reading.  We also pray our morning offering together.

We put up a little Christmas tree in our classroom. We all helped decorate and we are still bringing in ornaments. If you have any unbreakable ones that your family will not miss feel free to bring them in. We are also doing an Advent calendar. Every day someone gets a jolly rancher and reads a good deed. They also get to blow out the Advent wreath candles.

We are almost finished with Wonder. It is a great book!
By:Ella + Summer

This week we read some more Wonder. On Wednesday we finished Rube Goldberg.  Mr. Heinzen will have it on display so that we can share it with the rest of the school.  This week in English we learned about irregular verbs and regular verbs.

In gym class we played hockey and sticks ball and that was fun. We went on Quizlet and played around the world. We hosted the Advent Wreath Blessing and the all school Mass on Thursday and everyone did great.

 On Friday we had a play in social studies class. In social studies we did a graph  and next week we will do our own graph. Friday we sang a song Mary, Did You Know by Pentatonix. We also made snowmen in art class.  We also got our Brain Pop class set up so that we can watch Brain Pop.  Wwe watched one in English class on verb tenses and took a quiz.

 In Health we read a article about how you should not listen to loud music through ear buds because  the decibel level may be too much for our ears to be safe. It's nice it is warm so we have fun recces.