🎸🤘 Rock Your School Day? More Like ROCK YOUR TASTE BUDS! 🎶🥣 Our 8th Grade Food, Nutrition, and Wellness students turned up the flavor with a DIY Dip Challenge! Students put their creativity and culinary science skills to the test by experimenting with flavor combinations, textures, and food pairings to create their own original dips! From developing recipes with precise measurements to using kitchen conversion math to scale up their creations for judging, these students mixed a little science, math, and culinary magic! They also tapped into their entrepreneurial skills through food styling, photography, presentation, and marketing. The final result? Some seriously creative dips that were ready to ROCK the judges' taste buds! 🎸🔥😋 #RockYourSchoolDay #RockYourTasteBuds #DIYDipChallenge #OCMS #FutureFoodEntrepreneurs

🧵🪡 Sew Much Fun in 6th Grade FCS! Our 6th Grade Family & Consumer Sciences students have been building their basic hand-sewing skills! They’ve learned how to thread a needle, tie off their thread, and master several basic stitches. Each Friday, they put those skills to work by completing a fun mini sewing project. These hands-on lessons teach practical life skills that can be used for clothing repairs and personal projects—and could even grow into future entrepreneurship opportunities. Skills learned in FCS go far beyond the classroom! 🧵✂️

Last week’s Athletes of the Week were 8th graders Kenzie Wright who is a football cheerleader and Levi Sims who runs cross country. Kenzie’s coaches brag that she is an outstanding cheerleader!! Kenzie is always willing to do whatever is asked and always wears a big smile on and off the field. Not only is Kenzie a great cheerleader, she an awesome individual and student! Levi's growth in the sport of Cross-Country has been so fun to watch over the last three years. From beginning in the back of the pack to presently being one of our top runners, Levi leads in more than just the finish times. Levi gives good direction to his younger peers and encourages the others as he runs past them. While he keeps pursing PRs on the trail, Levi also manages to have great grades in his classes.

Last week, OCMS students connected with community members by reading the book If You Find a Rock. 8th graders visited the Oglethorpe County Senior Center. 7th graders were the guest presenters for story time at the Oglethorpe Public Library. Everyone enjoyed painting their own memory rock. We appreciate The Stone Store for providing the rocks. Thanks to Ms. Atao for coordinating and community member Lynn Faust for securing a Thrivent grant to fund this service-learning opportunity.

Mrs. Allgood’s 8th grade Computer Science class just finished a robotics unit. Instructors from Georgia Tech led the lessons through zoom each day, and the students were able to program the robots to perform certain tasks. We are so thankful for our partnership with Georgia Tech through the Rural Computer Science Initiative.

🎢 FCCLA Fall Rally at Six Flags! 🎢 OCMS FCCLA had an awesome day at Fall Rally at Six Flags! Our students had the opportunity to network with FCCLA members from across Georgia, compete in a variety of events, participate in leadership stations, complete a community service project, and enjoy plenty of fun along the way. ❤️🎡 It was a great day of leadership, service, competition, and connection—all while making some great FCCLA memories! Go Patriots! ❤️💙

The end of the quarter means it’s time to see Mrs. Serrian’s 6th & 7th Grade Ukulele Class Recital!

We got to celebrate our very own Mr. Darryl Brese today for being recognized as Oglethorpe County's District Teacher of the Year! We're so proud to have him represent OCMS and Oglethorpe County Schools!

Patriots Pumping Iron! We've had a lot of kids improve their maxes and make the record board this week in Weight Training! Coach Slover's Weight Training Record Board will be updated after we return for the 2nd quarter.

OCMS Softball brought back a past tradition Tuesday night of ending their season with a game of Players vs. Parents/Adults along with recognizing their 8th graders. We'll miss these gals! *The Adults won by a close margin.

Our 7th Grade Family & Consumer Sciences students wrapped up their culinary unit with a Student Body Project! Students researched a health and wellness topic that impacts teens—such as nutrition, sleep, stress, chronic disease, or healthy lifestyle choices. They then turned their research into creative visual presentations and shared what they learned with small groups of their classmates. A great way to build health knowledge, research skills, creativity, and public speaking confidence while learning from one another!

OCMS hosted the first annual Patriots Stars & Strips Invitational Cross Country Meet for middle and high schoolers. Our boys team placed 1st and Reeves Harrison finished 2nd overall. Thanks to Coach Darrius Tompkins & Coach Brandon Adams for their hard work to rebuild our OCMS campus track over the summer! We look forward to hosting many more meets in the future!

This week’s Athletes of the Week were 6th grader Lilly Graham who plays on the softball team and 7th grader Ayden Smith who plays on the football team. Lilly Graham deserves recognition for showing up every day ready to get better. She always has a good attitude and brings out the best in her teammates. Although she is a 6th grader, she is a leader on the field, and the tone setter for our team. Lilly’s teachers also report that she is an excellent student who maintains a positive attitude in the classroom. Ayden Smith has been a bright spot this football season. During our game against Commerce, Ayden was huge in stopping the Commerce offense. He had multiple individual tackles: 4 tackles for a loss and 2 quarterback sacks. Ayden has also been a great student this semester maintaining high marks in all of his classes.

8th grade math introduced the FUNCTIONS unit with a scavenger hunt this past week. Students were given clues they had to decode in order to find items at a certain location. All students were actively engaged and will use the concepts of decoding to further understand functions.

Friday’s Color Run to celebrate our PTO Boosterthon participants was a SMASHING SUCCESS!  The kids who attended HAD A BLAST!!! This has been our most successful fundraiser ever with an estimated $9,500 in donations.  THANK YOU! We met our goal, resulting in a faculty member being chosen to Kiss A Pig.  We met a stretch goal, resulting in the principal getting turned into an ice cream sundae.  If we can meet one more goal to surpass $10,000 by Wednesday morning, we’ll have a drawing to give away a $100 Amazon gift card to a student who earns donations in his/her name between this text and Tuesday at midnight.  Our donation site at www.mybooster.com remains open until next Friday night. THANKS AGAIN to our PTO parents, OCMS faculty & staff, & our parents/students/donors for helping reach this year’s fundraising goals! *See Facebook for more pics. Post 1 of 2

Here's our drawing winners from students AND teachers who have had PERFECT ATTENDANCE so far this year. Kudos to Trader Joes's-Athens, GA for their donation of mini bouquets to help us celebrate teachers who show up every day! 💕

Congratulations to these awesome students who were selected by their teachers for the Patriot Pride luncheon for the month of September for being examples of well rounded students in & out of the classroom.

Way to go, OCMS! We met our fundraising goal and can’t wait to celebrate at the Color Run tomorrow! Due to a lag in the reporting platform and the need to prepare for a safe event, THE CUTOFF FOR COLOR RUN PARTICIPANTS IS TODAY AT 6pm! Friends and families are welcome to continue donating, but our final list of Color Run Participants will close at 6pm tonight. We appreciate your continued support!

Our OCMS Football season came to an end Wednesday night with an 18-6 win over East Jackson. We recognize the efforts of this year's 8th graders and wish them well at the high school level next year. Special thanks to out football coaches, cheerleading coaches, & to the many parents that volunteered or provided for the team throughout the season to make it a success.

Congrats to our Football players, cheerleaders, & coaches on their 18-6 win over East Jackson to finish the season! We are just $600 away from our stretch goal of $8,000 for the fundraiser! Keep working hard and let’s turn a faculty member into a HUMAN SUNDAE! The student with the most donations received between the time of this message and 8am Thursday can pick the faculty member if we reach our goal! Remember, the student with the highest TOTAL donation in his/her name will select which staff member KISSES A PIG Friday! Be sure your student has at least $10 in donations if he/she wants to participate in the Color Run this Friday, and $30 in donations will get them a t-shirt.