Class News:

Middle School English

It is a new trimester, which means new units in English. The 8^th grade is enjoying the precocious narration and humor from our beloved Scout in part one of To Kill a Mockingbird. This week we introduced Literature Circles, so each student has been assigned to a group of five and will be given a different job as a discussion director, literary luminary, connector, character captain, or vocabulary enricher each day.  As I travel around the room and sit in on the different discussions, I witness debates, in depth discussions, and laughter at Scout’s many humorous comments. Moving down to 7th grade, the students completed their historical fiction short stories, and have another writing assignment they are crafting in both English and computer class. As we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird, the students sketched a map of Maycomb County as Harper Lee describes it throughout the book. Within their groups, they created a map in Google Draw, which they posted on their websites. Individually, they chose the location of their favorite scene and will write a third-person objective article or theme-based narrative paragraph that they will link to the map on their St. Andrews website, allowing the students to share their paragraph with everyone in the class. Also, as we are finishing the map project, we are preparing to read The Heart of a Samurai. In 7th grade advisory, we have a play writing committee of about 9 students who will be working together to write the class play, and after a preliminary brainstorming session, it looks like it will be a mystery...more to come in January. The 6th grade completed a short story unit before Halloween, which included, for many, an introduction to Edgar Allan Poe through the short story “The Tell Tale Heart.” During writer’s workshop and computer class, the students are now working with a partner to complete a newspaper from the 1800s that will include two third-person objective articles related to the crime in the “The Tell Tale Heart.” In literature we are undertaking Gilgamesh the Hero and the concept of an epic hero. The students are discovering that an epic hero is quite different than our modern-day idea of a hero.

2nd Grade

The 2nd Gators recently finished two more books in Book Club.  We read Henry and Mudge and the Careful Cousin and Snowshoe Thompson.  Snowshoe Thompson is about John Thompson, a Norwegian who immigrated to the United States in the mid 1800s.  He went on to deliver mail throughout the Sierra Nevada mountain range for many years.  He was one of the many Scandinavian immigrants who brought skis to the U.S.

We are working hard on improving our addition fact fluency.  We use our triangular fact cards and employ many strategies such as doubles, doubles plus one, and tens partners that enable us to add more quickly and efficiently. Our triangular fact cards also help us recognize that certain numbers are grouped together as fact families.  This will benefit us when we move on to subtraction.

We learned about the different types of seed dispersal (wind, water, animal, projectile).  We know the parts of plants and what plants to need to grow.

We have been reading letters from a Pilgrim girl and a Wampanoag boy that we receive from Scholastic.  We ponder what life was like for the early colonists as well as how their arrival impacted life for the Native Americans.  We learned about the first Thanksgiving and how it didn’t become a recognized government holiday until Abraham Lincoln was in office.

If you hear music coming from our classroom, we are probably practicing the Turkey Tango, which we will perform for our Grandparents’ Celebration.  We’ve got some awesome dance moves!

Brenda Stier and Paula Apffel
 

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