Alumni Alert!

SFCA UPDATE

2019

February

Abigail Lee Shirley Parents: Samuel & Cynthia Shirley

Abigail graduated from Seeds of Faith Christian Academy in May of 2013. She attended Bob Jones University and Westmoreland County Community College with a major in nursing. During her education she was employed at Conemaugh Hospital as a Clinical

Associate/Nursing Assistant. Abigail graduated from the Conemaugh School of Nursing in June 2018. Presently, she is employed as an RN at Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center in the Progressive Care Unit. Abigail is enrolled in the RN to MSN program at

Chamberlain University. She has had the opportunity to go on three missions trips since her graduation: the Dominican Republic (medical mission) in 2014, Island of

Metlakatla, Alaska in 2017, and Panama (medical mission) in 2018. Abigail is engaged to be married in October of 2019 to Matthew Middler. She is very thankful for the

teachers and staff at Seeds of Faith; their dedication and encouragement during her education was of immeasurable value.

Dates to Remember

Feb. 8th: Falcon Friday

Feb. 11th: Pizza Hot Lunch

Feb. 15th: Snow Makeup Day

Feb. 18th: No School

Feb. 19th: Middle School B-Ball, 5pm

Falcon Fridays

On Friday, Feb. 8th, students may pay $1 to wear jeans to school along with any SFCA shirt.

Drink Cards

Drink Cards are $6.00 for 20 cartons of milk or 10 cartons of lemonade.

Yearbook

Please submit your yearbook photos to info@seedsoffaithacademy.org

Tuition

Tuition payments are due the first of each month. A $40 late fee is applied if payment is not received by the 10th of the month. Please contact Angie Andreson; 724-463-7719 or Andreson@seedsoffaithacademy.org with questions.

Scrip

Scrip orders are due on Wed. by 12pm and may be

picked up the following Tues/Wed.

A reminder, if SFCA does NOT close or delay, busing follows your home school district’s closings or delay schedule. Students will be excused in these situa-tions. Parents are welcome to transport their own children on days their district busing is delayed or not operating.

In the event SFCA delays or cancels a school day, please refer to the following outlets:

Radio and Broadcasting Stations:

AM 1160 WCCS

AM 1450 WDAD

FM 106.3 WLCY

FM 92.5 WQMU

FM 105.1 WMUG

School Cast:

http://www.iu28.org/schoolcast

Television:

KDKA, WTAE, WTAJ, WJAC, WPXI

Get the latest information on cancellations and school delays sent directly to your phone. To sign up,

send a text to 84483 with the message “SFCASCHOOL”. You will receive a confirmation text stating

that you have been successfully added to the list.

RenWeb is a great tool to keep track of your student’s grades. Haven’t logged in yet or need help? Please call the office at

(724) 463-7719.

Flu shots are now available at MedExpress!

Flu shots are covered by most insurances or can be purchased

out of pocket for $30. MedExpress is open from 8am-

8pm daily.

Happy Birthday to the following SFCA Students!

Bryce Bieda

Ava Rudyk

Casidhe Shetter

Adam Kunkle

Joey Alsippi

Manny Echevarria

Skylar Carson

Lydia Murphy

Anita Lee

Landon Bieda

Matthew Inscho

Noah Varner

Due to the snow day on November 15, we will now be having school on February 15th, 2019

Remember, clearances must be submitted to the school office before the volunteer activity has been completed. All hours should be logged in the “Volunteer Log

Book” at the front desk.

Volunteers are needed for the following activities and events:

We’re looking for someone who is knowledgeable of tools and building to look at filing cabinets at our Graystone Campus. Several of them need some work done in order to keep from falling apart

Serving Pizza hot lunches and Pancakes & PJs hot lunches for both elementary and high school

We have been gifted a new copier from Holsinger, Clark & Armstrong, P.C. — we’re looking for someone with a large truck and/or equipment to help get the copier from their office on Philadelphia St. to our Graystone Campus

Donations of Clorox wipes, Lysol wipes, and plastic utensils are needed and greatly appreciated! Thank you!

comprehension, vocabulary and fluency. I usually read this book at least three times! Each time I read the book, I have a different purpose for reading it. Day one, we make predictions. Day two, we reread it using the event cards and discuss the sequence of events. Day three, we reread the book and focus on various vocabulary words in the book.

Brrrr. It’s cold outside so we brought the winter theme inside our class-room. Everything is frosty in kindergarten this month! We enjoyed a few snowman books like Snowmen at work and Snowmen All Year but Snowman at Night is one of my favorite winter books. Reading books mul-tiple times and using retell-ing cards builds

BUILD A SNOWMAN GAME: Do you wanna build a snowman? A little friendly competition to build our counting skills. It’s also helpful to practice taking turns and following the rules.

Kindergarten

K-Prep & Preschool 3

SFCA UPDATE Page 5

The Snowglobe Family is a fun book for any age! After reading it we tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a snowglobe. We have been working on writing sentences lately. This was a perfect time to use our sentence skills. We made a picture of us inside a snowglobe with sentences below it.

Our winter unit would not be complete without something sweet to eat! We made edible snow-men out of marshmal-lows, pretzel sticks and chocolate! Almost too cute to eat! Well… almost.

Watching an erupting volcano!

Fun with slime!

2019

with a hypothesis to go along with the experiment. The students hypothesized that ice kept in an insulated bag would stay colder than the ice kept by the window. The students predicted the outcome correctly and communicated the results with enthusiasm. With a simple experiment, the class was able to learn how the scientific method works.

We are also reading a biography of a famous scientist, George Washington Carver, a man who helped farmers and invented over three hundred uses for the peanut. He made many other important contributions to the world

throughout his life and career as a scientist and teacher. Studying the life a real scientist has helped build an understanding for what a scientist does and creates important connections in their learning.

Can you believe we are already halfway through the year? Our class continues to work hard to learn new things. Science is a new subject this quarter. We just started to dig into what scientists do and how they study the world around them to answer questions. The class learned the scientific meth-od to help understand the process by which scientists design and create experiments. Children are naturally curious and make wonderful “scientists”. Our first experiment involved following the scientific method through a simple process. We used two clear cups with ice and an insulated lunch bag. We asked a question, gathered materials, and came up

Brrr! It has certainly been cold lately! But that hasn’t stopped first grade from staying busy, busy, busy! Whether we were working on Writing, Reading, Phonics,

Math, Bible, or Science, we have certainly been working hard. January is always a unique month due to weather, mid-year testing, or sickness. We are thankful for a great month at school and for the Lord’s hand in the process of learning. We ended our Social Studies curriculum and began Science. So far we have talked about our five senses and the different types of weather. The great thing about our Science curriculum is that with every single lesson- it goes back to it all being given to us by God. My

goal over the next few months when issues arise is to always refer students back to these verses: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain con-ceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the inter-ests of the others (Philippians 2:3-4). As we have been learning in chapel about the attributes of Christ, we have been learning about how to live that out in our daily lives. It is time to put that learning into practice! More on this to come in the future months.

2nd Grade

1st Grade

Page 6

2019

program. Each of the older students is paired with a first grader to assist them with writing a story. The 9th and 10th write a portion of the story and illustrate it, and then the first grade do the same. The 9th and 10th graders are reading The Count of Monte Cristo. The 9th and 10th graders are study-

ing World War II. The 11th and 12th graders are studying the Scientific Revolution in

Europe-an His-tory.

Mrs. Caldwell’s 6th grade geography class is working on the continent of Europe. The 7th and 8th graders are study-ing the Washington administration in United States History. 9th and 10th grade English students are helping the first graders as part of a literacy mentoring

ing hard to find equivalent forms of fractions and deci-mals, and then learning how to order them. Grades 6-8 Bible class is working on indi-vidual presentations based on lessons in the Old Testa-ment. Grades 6/7 Science students have just finished studying natural resources, and they each did a study of how much water their fami-lies use in a day. The results

Mrs. Killam’s 7/8 and 11/12 English classes recently fin-ished presenting journal en-tries, in which they each chose a prompt to write about and then they presented it to the class. This was the most creative batch of journal en-tries yet! Grade 6 English is writing creative stories using prepositions (see the photo of some of them at work), and Grade 6 Math has been work-

were really eye-opening for them!

Mrs. Caldwell

3rd Grade

Mrs. Killam

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We are into the 3rd quarter, and January is flying by! We are quite deep into our multiplication unit in math, and these 3rd graders are amazing me left and right. Within the first three weeks, I had five students completely master their 0-12 multiplication facts, and the rest of the students are right on their tails. We are mixing math fact practice up with speed quizzes, memory & learn-ing games, and fun ways to reinforce the facts. In reading, we’re reading the chapter book, “Shiloh!” This book is about a young boy and his dog, courage, love, telling the difference be-tween right and wrong, and doing what it takes to save the ones we love. We studied science for the first half of the year, and have just now started into our social studies curriculum. We’ll be studying the United States & its regions. Our class is also having fun with Spirit Week so far! They are most looking forward to dressing like their “favorite book character!” In 3rd grade, we’re definitely finding ways to make learning fun, and chase away those winter blues.

2019

We had a fun and interesting January in the high school Science and Math classes. The Precalculus class is studying Trigonometric functions with the added complexity of imaginary numbers. The PreAlgebra class has been learning to solve some word problems backwards! They have also worked on solving equations with fractions and doing unit conversions. Algebra 2 students are working with factoring polynomials and finding the vertices and axis of symmetry for parabolic functions.

The Chemistry class is learning about the classification of elements in the Periodic Table and completed a lab with Gallium, a metal that literally melts in your hand!

Mr. Johnson

Mrs. McLaughlin

Page 8

The ninth and tenth grade Bible students have been taking a closer look at John 14 using parallel passages from the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, the John MacArthur study guide, word study, the Gospel of John movie and class discussion. Key concepts have included Christ’s deity, His care for us, loving obedience and the office of the Holy Spirit. John 14:6 was dis-cussed as Jesus truly is the way the truth and the life and that no one comes to the Father except through Him.

The eleventh and twelfth grade students have just finished studying the importance of documented eye witness accounts of Christ in Scripture as well as the basis for the reliability of the of the Scripture. We have just begun a study of the “Top Ten Reasons that We Know the New Testament Writers Were Telling the Truth”.

Both classes have done a very good job choosing weekly verses for memory, meditation and application. Both classes just finished a review of the Romans Road for sharing the Gospel.

I love class discussions with these dear young people!

The Earth Science are

studying Meteorology and

completed a Gizmo Lab on

Relative Humidity. The

Physics class has completed

a unit on Projectile Motion

and are working on a lab

with Catapults and

Marshmallows!

Box Tops for Education

The school earns $.10 for every Box Top submitted! Clipped Box Tops may be turned in at the front desk.

Martin’s A+ School Rewards

Use your Bonus Card while shopping at Martin’s and a percentage will be given to SFCA. Encourage family and friends who shop at Martin’s to par-

ticipate. All that you need to do is register your card online or at the service desk.

Giant Eagle’s Apples for Students

Register your Giant Eagle Advantage card online to send cash back to SFCA. You can even encourage your friends and family to participate!

AmazonSmile

When you shop using smile.amazon.com and list Seeds of Faith Christian Academy as your charitable organization, the school will receive .5% cash

back from your purchase.