Hello parents of the marvelous 7th/8th-grade students!

I heard back from some of you that this format of the newsletter is much better than bloomz. So, I’m making the switch and sending it out this way from here on out. Thanks for letting me know how it was received, and please let me know in the future if there is any way to further improve it.

Upcoming Events:

Monday, February 11th

GSA Registration for 8th grade students planning on attending GSA

Tuesday, February 12th

Living Wax Museum: 1:15-2:45 We hope you can make it and see what your child has learned

8th grade Dinner Fundraiser

School Board Meeting 6 PM

Friday, February 15th

There are many exciting events happening on Friday! Please feel free to attend these events and take part in a celebratory day!

Winter Carnival: 9:00-11:00

Presentations of Exploration Block projects: 11:00-12:00

Staff-Student Basketball game: 12:30-1:20

Early Dismissal at 1:30

February 18th-February 22nd

No School – February Break

Science/Social Studies: The students have been doing an incredible job finishing their projects for the Wax Museum next Tuesday! Their speeches are coming along and they will finish their posters on Monday. Thanks to Ms. Steed being able to borrow costumes from The Reach theater in Deer Isle, many students’ costumes are ready, but some might still need to get more things from home to finish. Please ask your child what they need for their costume or check the list here: http://bit.ly/waxcostumes.

English/Language Arts: This week, we finished practicing finding the speaker’s purpose. We watched a Ted Talk of a 12 year old boy speaking about the industrial food chain. The students had a graphic organizer they filled out answering the question of “what was the speaker’s purpose?” and providing details from the talk that support their choice of the speaker’s purpose. In general, there are three different purposes an author or a speaker has in their writing or speech. The three purposes are to inform, to persuade, and to entertain. Each piece of writing or speech can have more than one purpose, but we make sure to support the speaker’s purpose with evidence proving our claim.

Math – Our 7th-grade mathematicians completed their focus on writing and solving equations and inequalities. I was very impressed with their determination and teamwork in writing and solving these. This is a skill that takes a long time to fully develop, and we are well on our way! They are now working on some geometry concepts, starting with the beautiful circle. Ask them to sing a little song they know about circumference and area of a circle. (https://tinyurl.com/nbjqweh) Our 8th-grade mathematicians have been reviewing their skills with solving problems in scientific notation. I have been very impressed with their determination and willingness to take risks. They also completed a focus on solving complex linear equations. They applied what they learned about the distributive property and combining like terms to real-world scenarios. We are now moving into graphing these linear equations, starting with proportional relationships. We have one final week in our current WINN (What I Need Now) block, so 7th and 8th-grade students are focused on meeting the goals that were set 5 weeks ago to master fractions, or working on new goals if they met that one.

Spanish: Students are now preparing the 3rd and final part of their dialogues which will be complete next Wed. Feb. 13th. The goal is to speak Spanish for 3-4 minutes with a partner with few or no errors and a good pronunciation.