News from 8-I

8-I Blog

October 2013

English: Ms. Eckert’s students have just wrapped up their creative Animoto™ presentations, where they crafted 1:30 – 3:00 minute commercials about their chosen essay topics. The creativity demonstrated by our students was incredible! This past week, students have been working hard on their parts of speech and improving their overall writing skills.

In the photo, students are participating in a Jeopardy review game for their parts of speech quiz.

Health: Students are practicing communication skills by describing a picture, so students will be able to draw the exact likeness without visually seeing the picture. Students understand some of the communication problems when experiencing this activity.

Math:

The past two weeks were busy on 8I as we finished up our first units in math class.  Pre-Algebra 2 is taking their test today on order of operations, expressions, and data analysis. We did a group activity last week where students measured each other’s height and arm span to see if there was a correlation between the two. 

Algebra 1A just finished up their first unit on material that is needed in order to be successful in algebra. You can see a few students in the picture doing an activity on Surface Area and Volume. 

Algebra 1AB already finished their first unit and will be finished with their second unit the end of next week. 

Science: Students have finished up a chapter on minerals with an activity where they mined chocolate chips out of chocolate chip cookies.  They had a great time trying to keep their land in tact and not have to pay reclamation costs.

Social Studies: Classes are just beginning to study the Road to the Revolution.  We are building a case for why we needed to break away from England.  Students were given a "persona" for this unit.  Throughout the unit, they will be discovering how this time period affected them as colonists.  Once everyone has been affected, it will be time for a war! 

The Race for Education is underway and we are receiving donations daily!  Our goal is $15,000 toward a new sound system for our gymnasium as well as other educational needs.  We are over half way there in just our second day of returned mail.   We appreciate your continued support!  THANK YOU!

Mr. McIntyre's English Class: Students are studying subjects and verbs so that they can write better sentences.

Academic Literacy: Students are continuing to discuss themes surrounding "age," such as discrimination, stereotypes, cultures and their views on coming of age, along with various time periods or ages in history. In support of the informational texts students are reading, they have been determining and summarizing the central idea and applying text analysis concepts and skills to analyze news articles and web articles. Students are beginning to think critically about what they are reading by using humor, irony and/or delivering a message in the development and creation of their own cartoons that are related to themes or ideas pulled from text.  This is an introduction to teaching bias and opinion as we begin to look closely at the difference between subjective and objective ideas and details the author is using in informational text.