Middle School News – October 2022
Wow, has October flown by! Middle school learned some really cool things while also preparing for their student-led conferences this month. We had Grandparent and Grandfriends’ Day where students got to show off their musical skills. Art classes created their portfolios, P.E. classes completed fitness tests, and motion classes got to know each other playing silly games while creating a class playlist. And that isn’t all that has happened this month!
Technology is a fun class where students learn and use a variety of programs. This month fifth grade made avatars of characters from their book Esperanza Rising and then used them to illustrate a storyboard of a scene from the book. Sixth grade started the month using Google Slides to create a digital locker to tell their class about their families and their likes and dislikes. Once they finished their digital locker project, they moved over to an ABC book group project on Greek Mythology. Seventh and eighth grade each explored the world of music production. Each student got to create their own music by picking various instruments, tunes, and midi sounds.
Spanish this year started out with classes brainstorming what the MZ WAYS look like in Spanish class. All four middle school classes earned a classroom swag bag and some even earned the chance to win $1000 for their classroom from Duolingo! Fifth grade has been learning about weather and different expressions to describe the weather. They also got to taste some of the food mentioned in Esperanza Rising. Sixth grade has been exploring silly stories told in song using the Señor Wooly website. In seventh grade, it has been all about the MZ WAYS and making posters about ways students can apply the MZ WAYS in their classes. Take a walk around the school to see their posters! Special person interviews were introduced in eighth grade Spanish class. Students took turns being interviewed about their thoughts on the back-to-school season in Spanish. While learning about Hispanic Heritage Month, eighth graders enjoyed diving into the Señor Wooly graphic novel, “Billy y las botas”.
Fifth grade science has been all about working through problem solving as they build their volume farm animals. How can students get the rectangular prisms to stick together and stay in various positions? They have been working to find out! Next month, once they finish adding all the details and measuring their animals, they will open up a farm for everyone to see. In sixth grade, students have been learning about plant and animal cells. They looked at the different organelles and their jobs within each cell. Under a microscope sixth graders looked at their own cheek cells and a sliver of onion to see for themselves the difference between the shape of plant and animal cells. It is amazing to see how incredibly small a living cell is, and how it functions with other cells to create an organ and organ system and a living thing. It is so complex that only God could have designed life! Seventh and eighth grade jumped right in to studying the human brain. They read articles, labeled diagrams, and watched videos on the brain. Along the way, students looked at the teenage brain and how different it is, because after infancy, the brain’s most dramatic growth spurt happens in the preteen/teen brain. Mrs. Glasier thinks it was helpful for them to learn that there are parts of their brain fully developed, like the amygdala, and that the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until mid to late twenties. This explains why a teen primarily responds with their emotions and non-rational thought. Her hope and prayer was that they could see the amazing way in which God designed our brains to work and process everything we take in on a daily basis! Mrs. Platte will be back from her maternity leave very soon!
It has been a fun month in middle school. We can’t wait to see what next month holds!
