What’s in the works

Dear LREI Families,

No doubt there are those moments when, with the planets perfectly aligned, your child without prompting lowers the veil that shrouds her/his adolescent experience and lets you know about what is going on at school. These narratives of offered experience stand in bold contrast to the more mundane responses of “Nothing,” “It was fine,” “I forget.” So to assist you in the search for the holly grail of full disclosure, below please find an overview of some of the current happenings in our Middle School classrooms. My colleagues and I hope that they provide you with some valuable entry points into conversation with your child.

Fifth graders are . . .

  • in the midst of their “civilization simulation” and are creating shelters suitable for the climate and resources in their area. In this first phase that takes place 10,000 years ago, they will begin to “hunt and gather” food to survive as a band of nomadic peoples. They are also reading The Breadwinner, doing plurals in spelling, and writing about small moments that matter in writer’s workshop.
  • exploring beat and rhythm as a prelude to a study of melody and always singing, singing, and singing
  • flipping, exaggerating, inverting, and overlapping the letters of their names to create nonrepresentational compositions that emphasizes lines and shapes. The next challenge is to use their primary colors to create as many secondary colors as possible and use these colors to fill the negative space created by their letters.
  • continuing with their French adjective study and are using puppets to learn new body parts vocabulary

Sixth graders are . . .

  • getting to the heart of Beowulf’s struggle against the monstrous Grendel and creating timeline cards to get a better sense of the scope of the Middle Ages. Books talks and current events are also the order for the day.
  • delving into color theory by creating their own color wheels and exploring the relationships between primary, secondary and tertiary colors. This study has led to a set of drawings of mirror images with one side painted in primary, secondary and tertiary colors and the mirror image painted in complementary colors.
  • composing and notating 4-measure rhythm-only phrases and exploring melodies based on Mediaval themes
  • Practicing oral and written dialogues using new French vocabulary
  • refining their soccer skills, making their way along the climbing wall and and learning new fitness routines
  • using “Inspiration” to create digital family tress and learning how to organize data on the computer

Seventh graders are . . .

  • continuing their thematic exploration of the novel, The Giver, by Lois Lowry and are finding textual evidence to support the novel’s many themes, including sameness and Utopian ideals, ignorance versus knowledge, fairness and its relationship to justice, and the subtle differences between honor and power. This work is finding its way into a formal book review. Students are also well into the notetaking process as they gather information for their Colonial Research Papers and Projects.
  • learning English Country dances from 1650, and exploring African-American ring shouts.
  • writing descriptive sentences in French using multiple verbs
  • making JJ Walker field the home of some spirited soccer workouts
  • designing, carrying out, writing up and presenting on their investigations that have focused on identifying and controlling variables, and collecting and analyzing data about the properties of matter

Eighth graders are . . .

  • concluding a study of Bob Dylan by writing a critical analysis of a Dylan song
  • deducing meanings from context through their close reading of the French text Un Ete pas Comme les Autres
  • exploring the early roots of the American Civil Rights Movement from multiple angles and have committed themselves to the notion of studying history from the “bottom up,” through the voices of the disenfranchised.
  • raising the level of their soccer skills and tactics to new heights
  • investigating motion and deriving and coming to an understanding of Newton’s Laws on Motion. They are also reviewing the principles of Simple Machines and will soon be using this information to design and construct mousetrap powered vehicles to illustrate these concepts.

Be well,
Mark

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