Mustang Round-Up
2018-19 Cheyenne Middle School Newsletter - March
Principal News
Hello Cheyenne Families!
It is hard to believe that Spring Break is right around the corner with these bitter cold temperatures and snow. The end of the 3rd nine weeks is Friday, March 16. The flu and strep season is still in full force and has impacted our families and staff. Makeup work is sometimes an added burden, and it is difficult to make up instructional time. Our team is trying to be flexible and accommodating as best they can. It is imperative that students schedule times with their teachers for instruction, review, and/or assessments. Students receive the total days absent plus one for makeup work. If you are unsure about how many days don’t hesitate to contact teachers, counselors or administration to get details. When students are out sick, it is essential to return to school with a medical note as soon as possible.
It is vital during this time of year for students to remain focused on their academics and seek out help if needed. This is crucial for student grades to maintain or improve throughout the semester. Many of our students are playing a spring sport or participating in the musical and musical contests and must understand to play and compete you must be eligible. Eligibility creeps up on our students. Each student is notified when they are placed on probation. The second consecutive week with an F they are ineligible. It is essential to get our students practiced at following their grades and attendance in the portal, so they are able to track their own progress. Thank you for helping your child stay focused during the fourth nine weeks.
There will be many events in the coming weeks. Spring Break is March 18-22, 6th and 7th-grade students will receive their enrollment packets soon and enroll online, our future Mustangs have visited Cheyenne, and state testing will be scheduled during the state testing window April 1-May 3.
We hope you and your family enjoy some time together during Spring Break and return refreshed.
As always we encourage you to reach out to us if you have questions or concerns. Your partnership with us is much appreciated and helps our students succeed!
We are Cheyenne!
We are Mustangs!
Michelle Grinsteiner
Principal
State Board of Education Approves Oklahoma School Report Cards
Orchestra Superior Ratings
Mustangs Making a Mark
TSA Competitors Bring Home Trophies
PTO News
It’s been icy and cold but Spring is around the corner…I promise ! Spring Break is coming up March 18-22. We hope our Cheyenne families have a great break together! We are finalizing our Spring t-shirts and they are going to awesome! They are going to be bright, fun and our students are going to love them! Details will be given soon on how to purchase one. By purchasing a t-shirt, you are helping to raise money for our school.
Cheyenne’s 7th grade social will be March 11th 3-5pm at the school. It is guaranteed to be a fun time! Info has been sent home with our 7th grade students. We hope to see them all there!
Your Cheyenne PTO has been supporting, fundraising and volunteering so that Cheyenne continues to be the amazing school that it is. Come join us! Want to know how? Check out and Like our Facebook page, Cheyenne Middle School PTO or our website, www.cheyennemspto.com. One of the best ways to see how what we are all about is to come to a general meeting! Our next one is March 5th at 1:15 pm at the school. We would love to meet you! We are already planning ahead for the next school year and we need YOU! We want your ideas and feedback!
Upcoming March Events
3/5 General PTO meeting
3/5 Spirit Night at Qdoba
3/6 Pizza Day during school $1/slice and $10/box
3/11 Spirit Night at Papa Murphy’s
3/13 Kona Ice is back! Sold during school
3/14 Teacher Appreciation Luncheon ( a SignUp Genuis will be sent out to help)
3/18-22 SPRING BREAK!
We are Cheyenne!!
We are Mustangs!!
Rebecca Yacabucci
PTO President
6th Grade Academic Team Headed to State
7th Grade Academic Team Headed to State
Future 6th Graders Tour Cheyenne
We are excited to have these wonderful students attend Cheyenne next year!
Students from John Ross, Ida Freeman, Cross Timbers, Frontier, Russell Dougherty, Clegern and other Elementary Schools were in attendance through two days of tours.
ASA AFTER SCHOOL ADVANTAGE-Free Math Tutoring
A Bus will be available students home or parents can pick up.
Students must arrange ASA AHEAD OF TIME with their math teacher and parents to stay and get help, retake a test, do test corrections, study/review for a test, get help with math homework, or complete missing assignments.
State Testing Monitors Needed
Please consider volunteering for state testing by monitoring a test or two! State testing occurs in April! Watch for future emails and notifications regarding Cheyenne testing dates.
If you would like to help the district or Cheyenne by monitoring for state testing, you will need to attend one of the following training sessions.
LOCATION:
Edmond Public Schools Administration Building
1001 W. Danforth Road
Edmond, OK 73003
March 15th at 10:00 AM
March 15th at 2:00 PM
March 27th at 10:00 AM
March 27th at 2:00 PM
All training will be in the Oklahoma B conference room. Those trained will not need to be trained again at your site. You do not need to register for the training dates. You will sign in when you arrive.
Thank you for volunteering!
TSA News
Competition Season part 2
February allowed our members the chance to travel and compete in two different mini conferences. In February alone the Cheyenne TSA group brought home 36 different trophies from CAD to Off the Grid to Video Game Design. Cheyenne TSA Parents were a BIG help with the Edmond Conference on February 9th. It took a village to judge and we couldn’t have done it without all the helpers. Congratulations to Austin Vinall who made through as a semi-finalist for a Regional TSA Officer position for the 2019-2020 school year. We wish you best of luck in the final round!
Upcoming:
March 5 - Packet for State available
March 6 - Western Regional Conference
March 7 - TESTING for State Events
(coding, electrical applications, forensics, and tech. bowl)
March 12 - T.E.A.M.S. Testing (so NO TSA meeting)
March 15 - State Paperwork is DUE
April 10,11 and 12 - State TSA Conference
Band Blast
Hello to all from the band world. Thank you for your support with our seventh annual mattress sale.
Our final band/orchestra fundraiser will begin this March 1. Please consider supporting our program through purchasing a Yankee Candle.
ENHS 6th grade band day is March 7, 2019. Cheyenne and Sequoyah 6th grade band students will combine for a collaboration rehearsal.
The 7th and 8th grade students will have a solo pre-contest recital on Thursday, March, 28, 2019 at 6:30 pm in the Cheyenne band room. This is a mock performance to help the students prepare for their upcoming solo contest performances. Families are encouraged to attend.
The 7th and 8th grade band students will be attending the Edmond Chamber Solo/Ensemble Festival on Saturday, March 30 . All 7th and 8th grade band students are required to participate in this festival, solos(optional) and ensembles(required) will be performing.
All interested students in 7th and 8th grade have an additional solo contest opportunity at Deer Creek Band Festival on Saturday, April 13.
The 7th grade band will have an after school rehearsal on Thursday, May 2, 2019, 2:45-4:00 pm in preparation for the spring concert.
There will be a percussion concert on Thursday, May 2, 2019, at 7:00 pm for Cheyenne percussionists. This concert will also include percussion ensembles from Sequoyah Middle School and Edmond North High School. This concert will be at Edmond North High School in the auditorium. 7th & 8th grade percussionists will be performing.
The 6th, 7th and 8th grade bands will have their spring concert on Tuesday, May 7, 2019, 6:30 pm at Edmond North High School. This performance is a required grade.
Musically yours,
JoeLee Mills, Meagan Stevens, and Greg Mangus
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein
From the Orchestra Podium
The 7th and 8th Cheyenne Middle School Orchestras competed on February 26th in the OSSAA District Orchestra Contest at Santa Fe High School. Both ensembles worked very hard to prepare for both the concert and sight-reading competition and received superior ratings! Because of this accomplishment., both groups received the Outstanding Achievement Award! Congratulations on their outstanding accomplishment!
Coming up on Saturday April 6th, the Edmond Chamber Music Festival (ECMF) will be held at Cheyenne Middle School. The event is for 7th and 8th grade orchestra students only. This is a great chance for our students to hone their performance skills with a solo and ensemble while receiving valuable comments from a respected musician in the field. All 7th and 8th grade orchestra students are required to participate in this festival.
On March 27th the 6th grade orchestra will go on a field trip to the Oklahoma City Philharmonic. This is a reschedule of the trip from November. This is an exciting opportunity for the kids to hear a professional orchestra. I will be needing a few chaperones for this event.
Thank you parents and patrons for your continued support of our orchestra program! Jeff Ketch
Billy Samuel
Project Alert for 6th Grade
Providing Motivation and Skills to Say "No"
6th Grade Lessons begin this month.
We will send the lesson topics so that families can follow-up with their child at home.
Derek Talkington
Research highlights from your School Psychologist:
Exercise and Sleep: The Better Brain Therapies Your Child Needs
This month’s research highlights are about the positive effects of exercise for all children, especially those who may suffer from symptoms of ADHD.
Science has finally agreed that the brain is malleable and “plastic.” This means that the brain can, to a surprising extent, reinvent itself with learning, experience, or the right stimulation. This reinvention is called “epigenetic” — the biological process by which life experiences can override, add to, or interact with what genes do, changing how we feel, think, or behave.
Besides nutrition, exercise is particularly relevant to growing the parts of the brain that strengthen self-regulation and executive function, and can help to counteract or improve ADHD. Getting exercise and sleeping well is obviously good for general health, and especially good for children. But for kids with ADHD, exercise and sleep may have specific benefits that will surprise you.
Particularly interesting is a series of findings showing that, for developing children, aerobic exercise expands the growth of brain connections, the frontal cortex, and the brain chemicals (such as serotonin and dopamine) that support self-regulation and executive functioning. These surprisingly specific findings in typically developing children have led to excitement about the possibility that the right kind of exercise can help ADHD.
Exercise is one of the lifestyle factors with the clearest epigenetic effects. A sustained fitness program, at any age, causes significant epigenetic changes throughout the body (some of which are obvious, like heart and muscle genes), and also in the brain.
School, Focus, and Exercise
For kids with ADHD, academic problems are the number one complaint from parents. Fortunately, developmental studies of children and exercise have used academic results as a primary focus. A major study, published in 2014 by the Society for Research in Child Development, concluded that exercise led to improved academic performance in children — more than an equivalent amount of additional class or study time.
Between 2013 and 2016, experts assembled all available studies on exercise’s effect on self-regulation and ADHD to produce several scientific reviews. One, published in the Annual Review of Psychology, concluded that typically developing children show better attention and executive function on the days they exercise.
Such authoritative reviews lead to the following conclusions: Fitness is associated with better working memory, response inhibition, and learning in children. We need more randomized trials, but if we peer into the future, we see that exercise will improve attention and executive functioning in typically developing children, and it directly counteracts ADHD by building self-regulation into the brain.
Current research, while still preliminary, suggests that aerobic exercise can provide noticeable improvements in ADHD symptoms — about half as much improvement as is brought by medication and possibly more than from dietary changes.
For many families, daily exercise for children is a challenge, depending on climate, weather, cost, and neighborhood. Here are some solutions that families found:
Alison went for a long bike ride with her son before school on nice days.
Alejandro enrolled his daughter in a special martial arts class for children with ADHD.
Mike installed a punching bag in the basement and taught his teen son how to do workouts with it.
Jill was able to get her two children outside to jump rope, play hopscotch and tag, and engage in other active play with her neighbor’s kids several times a week, enough to see some change in their mood.
Tania signed up her daughter for dance lessons, which she enjoyed.
Bob loved running and got his preteen kids interested in running with him, setting up fun family competitions.
Take-Home Points
1. Exercise is more important for children with ADHD than it is for other kids.
2. Exercise and fitness have nice side effects of protecting your child from serious health problems (like diabetes or being overweight), improving the health of skin, muscle, bone, and improving coordination, while advancing brain growth in systems that support self-regulation and help combat ADHD.
3. The good epigenetic effects may be sustained for years, even after exercising slacks off. We are still learning how many effects are short-term versus long-term.
4. Exercise is a powerful way to create epigenetic change that can overcome negative events that were experienced earlier. Studies have reported that exercise can prevent or reverse the effects of stress and trauma in early life.
Next month’s article will focus on sleep.
Be a Library Volunteer
We are looking for adult volunteers to assist in the Media Center. Please contact Dana Whitmarsh, the Library Assistant, at dana.whitmarsh@edmondschools.net if you would be interested in signing up for special projects (once or twice a year) or to be a regular volunteer (weekly).
Regular volunteers (weekly) help check in and out library materials, shelve books, create bulletin board and/or display projects, and encourage the love of reading.
The mission of the Media Program is to encourage the reading habit and to foster skills that make our students good information seekers, judges, and thinkers.
Get Your Earbuds Now!
Order Your Yearbook Today!
Cheyenne Socks-Only $10 per pair!
Chromebook Care-Tech Code of Conduct
Athletics
Current Schedules are available online.
Athletic participation forms must be completed before attending any practices.
A recent doctor's physical must also be completed and returned to Mr. DeForest, athletic director. The forms can be completed online. You will need your child's student ID number to complete an account and forms. The doctor's physical form can also be downloaded from the link.
School Information
Infinite Campus New Campus Student and New Campus Parent App
Infinite Campus has a new Campus Student and a new Campus Parent app available to download.
Campus Student and Campus Parent are designed to provide real-time access to student information. The easy-to-use design displays what is currently happening in the classroom so you can understand, monitor, and participate in the educational process.
» Announcements
» Assignments
» Attendance
» Grades
» Schedules
Infinite Campus Mobile Apps can be downloaded through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
Learn more at infinitecampus.com/parents-students
Attendance Line: 726-5751
Please call your child in absent prior to 10:00 am. Leave a message with child's name, grade, and reason for absence. This line is for attendance messages only and will automatically go to voicemail. Please only call once. Do not call or email the teachers and/or counselors. Parents must call the attendance line to report absences.
Box Tops for Education
Homeroom Competition is on now for the 3rd 9 weeks!
Turn in Box Tops to your Homeroom Teacher
6th Grade 1st hour
7th Grade 1st hour
8th Grade 3rd hour
Jostens Yearkbook Orders
Dress Code Expectations
Chromebooks
Cafeteria
Free & Reduced Price Meal Applications
If you do not have internet access for the online application, printed applications are available at your child's cafeteria. Completed applications (pages 9 & 10 of the application packet), may be emailed to (Susan.Freeman@edmondschools.net); faxed (405-330-7303); or turned in to your child's cafeteria, school office, or the Child Nutrition Office (125 N. State Street).
(The meal application is available in 49 other languages by clicking here.)
Lunch Account Online
Important: checking out students, lunches, & messages
You will be required to have your driver license to check your child out. Plan enough time for checkout. Calls to check out a student prior to arriving at the school are not accepted.
Lunches: If delivering lunches please make sure you have conveyed it to your child in advance. We do not deliver lunches to classrooms. Students will pick up in the office when dismissed from class. Family members are not allowed to have lunch with their child in the cafeteria. If you would like to eat with your child, you are welcome to join them in the office.
Messages: Please make arrangements with your child for transportation or other such issues in the morning before school begins. We will provide messages to students when provided before 2:00. We cannot guarantee messages will arrive to students if received after 2:00pm.
Demographic & Contact information on Parent Portal
Personal Devices
The implementation of school provided Chromebooks brings an end to the academic need for personal devices during the school day. With that, we will be expecting personal devices to be off and out of sight for the duration of the school day. In remaining consistent with our middle school practice, devices will be allowed before the first school bell at 7:40 and after the last bell at 2:40. We recognize that personal devices are part of the everyday world that we live in as well as our future, and know the incredible capability that today’s technology brings to our life. For young adolescents, it also presents many challenges. Recent research is now showing that middle school-aged students are spending an average of 4.5 hours a day on their personal devices. That number increases to 8 hours a day by the high school years. As educators and parents we see how many of our kids are immersed on social media platforms, gaming, mass
(sometimes hidden) communications and other varieties of content consumption. For a great many students this creates social-emotional and/or academic challenges during school, in addition to the challenges from an instructional point of view. We are seeking to increase classroom engagement and reduce outside distractions, and we appreciate your support in this transition. If you need to get an urgent message to your child, we will be happy to help in that communication from the office.
Cheyenne Middle School
Michael DeForest, Assistant Principal & Athletic Director, 8th grade administrator
Deby McWatters, Assistant Principal, 7th grade administrator
Melissa Krause, Counselor 6th
Kathy Parker, Counselor 7th
Michele Kingdom, Counselor 8th
Website: http://cheyenne.edmondschools.net/
Location: 1271 West Covell Road, Edmond, OK, United States
Phone: 405-340-2940
Facebook: facebook.com/@edmondcheyenne