Billings iNews: January 9, 2025

Inside Billings

January 9, 2025

Welcome Back!

🎒 What's Happening at Billings? 📚

We're sad to say goodbye to the holiday sweaters, but ready to bring in the new year! Please read on for more about the Winter Term here at Billings.

Mike on the Mic 🎤

Happy New Year! We loved welcoming all of your children back! I hope that you enjoyed some special time over the break and found ways to disconnect from your typical schedule and reconnect with loved ones.

A reminder that our next BFA Meeting is tomorrow at 8:30am and you should have received your child’s Fall Report Cards at the start of this week. Please let April know if you have any questions.

On Monday, our teachers were hard at work preparing for the students’ return. We’ve jumped into Winter Term with a special schedule designed to inspire your students with unique field trips and opportunities to explore the outdoors in winter and prepare for an awesome Winter Production. We’re excited that 7^th and 8^th graders will be going on our first snowshoeing and sledding trip of the new year tomorrow. Teachers are putting in so much extra effort to make all of these things work simultaneously, so please give them some special shout-outs and thank yous!

Finally, as our goal is always to promote socialization and connection as we start each day, our gym will be open at 8:00am every morning, so students are welcome to head right inside after they greet me. We’ll keep this up through Winter Term.

Here’s to a wonderful 2025,

Mike

✒️ Deans on the Scene 🎓

Fall Term report cards have been emailed to parents and should be available to view in Alma. If you have not seen your student's report card or are having difficulties signing in, please reach out to Becca for assistance - otherwise, any and all questions regarding the content of report cards should be fielded to April.

Our second i-Ready diagnostics will begin later this month in ELA and Math.

Upcoming Events: 📅

BFA All Family Meeting: Friday, 1/10 at 8:30am
POCIS Families, Faculty & Staff of Color Mixer: 1/11, 7:15pm-8:45pm at Kraken Ice Complex
[NO SCHOOL] Martin Luther King Jr Day - Monday, 1/20
UW Bowling Night: Saturday, 1/25 - 5:00pm-7:00pm
[NO SCHOOL] Prospective Student Visit Day: Friday, 1/31

See our full calendar below:

Community Calendar

👀 Inside the Classroom 📖

We’ve enjoyed welcoming students back after a restful holiday break! The first snowshoeing adventure for 6th grade is next Friday, January 17th and will be led by 8th graders. Our peer leaders will facilitate snowshoeing, shelter-building, and other activities to prepare 6th graders for future winter trips. 8th graders are encouraged to bring their planners daily and to check off with their families. This will be a great opportunity to learn from and share experiences with our most snow-seasoned students! The main “homework” priority for 6th graders and families this week is checking the Winter Program Gear List to start organizing essential items and send any gear requests to Melissa ASAP. Meanwhile, 7th grade is putting us all in the spring spirit with the first pickleball games of the year.

8th Grade Design Lab wrapped up the term with a spirited Robotics Competition on the First LEGO League SUMBERGED game board. Teams had two rounds of two and half minutes to have their robots autonomously solve as many challenges and earn as many points as possible. Each team member had to individually code an attempt to solve a challenge and rotate within the time period. Congratulations to Team Turtles for winning the team points competition and to Naomi for best exhibiting teamwork and gracious professionalism! Over the term, students built and iterated their robot design and learned block-based coding to control their robot's movements based on distance measurements and sensors. It was fun to hear them cheering each other on!

8th graders began their new Math unit - Functions - this week. They explored the connections between graphs and stories by analyzing key aspects of the representations to match the important details of the stories. As we go forward, the students will work towards mastering function notations and representations to justify if a relationship is a function. At the end of the unit, the students will write a story about a day in their life and create a graph to represent their experience(s).

7th grade is returning to Science with two mini-units! First up is the Science Behind Climate Change, followed up by Environmental Justice & Emotionality. 7th graders will be spending this week in science, compiling what they already know about climate change and what they are interested in learning more about on a local and global scale. In collaboration with Social Studies, students will have the opportunity to take a place-based approach with a local case study: the Ballard Locks & Lake Washington, as they learn the history and environmental impacts on the surrounding ecosystem and human communities.

6th grade is starting their third unit of the school year - Climate and Weather. We are looking forward to learning more about our local weather and climate in Washington, as well as the greater global climates.

8th grade has finished Chemistry and has moved on to our first Physics unit - Forces and Motion. We will be completing several hands-on projects during this unit including a crossover with ExpEd. Students will get the opportunity to build and test their own sleds during this unit.

7th grade students jumped right back into ELA with our novel study unit. Students helped one another review our unit novel, My Name Is Not Easy, by using chapter summaries to identify characters, settings, and conflicts before turning their assigned chapters into short skits. Students performed these skits for one another in chapter order to fully catch the classroom up! As we finish up our novel, students can look forward to a hands-on project exploring the connection between people and place.

6th grade students are currently reading Amal Unbound and analyzing the author’s use of indirect characterization. Students will also be preparing for a vocabulary quiz coming up next week, allowing them to demonstrate their understanding of our new vocab words found within their novel. As we look ahead towards finishing up Amal Unbound, students can look forward to a hands-on project allowing them to creatively depict their understanding of the character arcs found within the novel.

8th grade Social Studies completed a final wrap of the Salem Witchcraft trial and will begin exploring types of government systems including democracy, socialism and fascism. In the coming weeks students will begin their study of Judaism and the Holocaust.

7th grade is reading creation myths from indigenous groups in Washington State and will write their own stories next week.

6th grade practiced writing (on paper) their names and a short sentence in alphabetic cuneiform. Next they will create their own message on a clay tablet!

Production prep has begun in earnest for our March show, The Nut-Brown Girl. Each discipline–acting, stage management, design, singing, and band–has begun the initial work to learn protocols, expectations, and skills prep so that we are ready to dive into our first read-through on Monday.

We are looking for VOLUNTEERS! A survey will come out in next week’s iNews, but if you happen to be a sewist or builder, please let Gillian and Sabrina know right away!

From the BFA:

Join Us for BFA Meeting Tomorrow 1/10

The January BFA meeting will be tomorrow Friday 1/10 from 8:30-9:30am. The agenda is posted here. Come learn about upcoming events, meet fellow parents and caregivers, and get involved!

Neurodiversity Affinity Group Meeting on 1/13

The group’s next virtual meeting will be Monday 1/13 at 7:30pm. The group is open to all parents and caregivers of neurodiverse students. To sign up for the group, register here. Not sure if you’re already a member? You can view your google group memberships here.

Registration Now Open for UW Bowling Night on 1/25

Billings’ annual take-over of UW’s bowling alley is Saturday, January 25th from 5-7pm. Register here to bring the whole family for bowling and pizza at UW’s student union (the HUB). Suggested donation per person is $15. As a special treat, 6th-grade parent and architect Scheer Chan will lead tours of the HUB, which he designed!

Looking for Auction Help

The spring fundraiser will be on April 4th, and the Auction Committee is looking for additional hands. If you’re interested in helping with procurement, decorations, or any other tasks, please contact Koby.

Admissions Help with School Reviews

With admissions season in full swing, you can help prospective families understand what is special about Billings by submitting a review of the school. Sharing a brief paragraph about why you chose the school or how your child has grown makes a huge difference to applicant families. Please take a few minutes to submit a review to Niche, Great Schools, and Private School Review. You can submit the same review to all three!

Parenting Resources

Navigating Neurodiversity: Strength-Based Support for ADHD Kids

With Dr. Edward (Ned) Hallowell, psychiatrist and New York Times best-selling author

Jan. 16, 2025, noon–1 p.m. PT

The Awakened Brain: Spirituality and Raising Adolescents w/ Dr. Lisa Miller, Ph.D

January 16th, 2025, 6-7pm

📣 In the Community 🏘️

We've got a lot of opportunities for families and students to contribute to the Billings experience coming up, such as:

Yearbook

This year's Yearbook Club will be starting next week. It will be held twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday during lunch. Interested students can send an email to Emma or sign up on one of the sheets hanging in the halls. Students will be able to practice their photography, writing, graphic design, and interview skills while creating an important keepsake for the entire Billings community!

Crafting

We are looking for VOLUNTEERS! A survey will come out in next week’s iNews, but if you happen to be a sewist or builder, please let Gillian and Sabrina know right away! If you are neither of these but have a lot of newspapers lying around, you can bring them to the Front Desk to be used for the sets and props. We pride ourselves on the Winter Production being an all-school event, and that includes the families and wider community! Your inclusion means so much to us and shows the students what a community really can do when it comes together.

Resources

Do you know of a local (or global) organization/person who is doing amazing work in the environmental field (science and/or activism)? Please send their info to Amira to have them featured on the list of possible research topics for the 7th Grade Environmental Justice Final Research Project.

Check out these ParentMap articles:

For more support and resources surrounding the youth mental health crisis, screen time and social media, and the importance of play, visit ParentMap’s Antidote for the Anxious Generation page.

Speaker links

Screenagers website
Dr. Delaney's weekly blog, Tech Talk Tuesday
Screenagers YouTube channel
The Screenagers Podcast

Executive Function Workout!

💡 New Year, New Day!💡

We are switching to Wednesday mornings for our winter EF Workouts!

Join me (Greg: Director of The Learning Center at Billings) for a regular morning EF workout from 8:30am to 9:30am on Wednesdays. Developing EF, or Executive Function, requires the exercise of the brain in specific ways. Drop in on any Wednesday morning to share stories and explore strategies for strengthening our EF muscles and by extension, that of our students.

Think of EF (Executive Function) as the CEO of the brain, helping us improve our self-regulation and aid our ability to make both short and long-term plans that enhance our performance in many aspects of our life. At a middle school pragmatic level this includes things like: doing your nightly HW, working on long term projects, or doing chores around the house. This is not a class. This is an opportunity to share collective wisdom. While 30 plus years as a middle school educator has certainly allowed me to garner some wisdom, I am really a facilitator on Wednesday mornings. Regular attendance is not a prerequisite. I don't need advanced notice. Drop in as you are able.

We will be meeting in person in Mercury during advisory and the beginning of first period. If you do not want to attend in person and prefer Zoom, let me know and I will send you a recurring Zoom link. Masks are not required but can be provided upon request.

And if Wednesday mornings are not a viable option for you but you want to learn more, don't hesitate to e-mail me, and let's find time to chat 1-1.

Click the icons to follow us on Social Media!

Looking for old issues of iNews?

Visit the archive.