8th Grade 1st Quarter Newsletter

In choir, students are reviewing the skills they had learned from last year: singing in three parts, sight-reading various music examples, and working out our voices to build stamina. Currently, we are working on two choral pieces: “Loch Lomond”, a Scottish folk song about Lake Lomond & “Fix You”, the popular song by British band Coldplay. In the coming weeks, students will be learning many more songs for their first concert in December. Next week, 8th grade students will have the opportunity to audition for this year’s JAM Fest on November 2nd. These students will enter in for a chance to win $300 at the annual music competition. Keep an eye out for this amazing opportunity.

In engineering, we will be working on two major projects in the 1st quarter of 8th grade. We also already had fun with some Amazon build-boxes making battery-powered planes and solar-powered cars. We are already well into the planning stages of our “Ping Pong Madness” project. Students are building launcher and catchers for ping pong balls, in preparation for our large (and fun!) elimination tournament in a few weeks. Following the conclusion of Ping Pong Madness, we will begin our trigonometry unit to prepare for the next large-scale project: Balsa Wood Bridges. Throughout all of these projects, we are working on project documentation, the design process, teamwork, and various applicable engineering concepts.

Innovation started this year off with learning about the Engineering Design Process. We were able to practice a basic understanding of the process through our first lab- Paper Airplanes! Students learned how to create a question, research/brainstorm, and make changes to their design based on their data. As we head into the rest of the quarter, we will continue creating with the design process, experimenting with science principles and learning about careers within the STEM field.

8th Grade ELA classes started the year by reviewing the habits of successful students, building community, and selecting our first independent books for the quarter! Please talk with your child about their book choice and continue encouraging them to read at home. Project choices for this independent book will be coming home soon. Looking ahead, we will be moving into our short story unit. In this unit, we will analyze a variety of short stories, looking specifically at characterization, plot development, and themes within a story, and citing textual evidence in this analysis. Canvas courses will be updated weekly to reflect the specific stories and skills we will cover.

8th Grade Math

In 8th grade math, we started the year by reviewing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide integers. We recalled ways we see negative numbers in the world, for example temperatures or even bank accounts. Now we have jumped into our “Real Number System” unit. In this unit we are working with fractions, decimals and square roots. The next unit is about “Exponents and Scientific Notation”. Understanding exponents and scientific notation is important for high school level math and science classes. At the end of the quarter we will be working on solving equations.

Algebra Class

This quarter in Algebra we will be working through the first three chapters of our CPM Curriculum. CPM is the math curriculum program that our district uses for its high school mathematics. It is a wonderful curriculum that focuses heavily on student participation and conceptual understanding through thinking. I am working through every problem in the text and writing lessons and learning opportunities that give your students everything that they need to learn. Chapter 1 narrows in on functions - the major things that students should walk away with from this Chapter is what a function is and how to use function notation. Chapter 2 focuses on Linear Relationships. The first half of this chapter will be largely review from the 8th grade standards of Linear Relationships. We have done pre-assessments on Linear Relationships and we will need the review time. Then in the second half of this chapter we will dive deeper into Linear Relationships. The likelihood is that we will start but not finish Chapter 3 during the first quarter. Chapter 3 focuses on simplifying expressions and solving equations. Similar to Chapter 2, there will be a brief review, and then we will dive deeper into these skills.

As we work through all of our content, students will have access to all of the materials that we use on Canvas. Our daily slides are linked in Canvas. Additionally, answer keys for each of the Learning Opportunity assignments will be uploaded to Canvas. A note on answer keys: when I create an answer key for Learning Opportunities, I will intentionally make a small number of mistakes on the answer key. The purpose of this is two fold. First, and most importantly, it makes the students think. They have to truly consider their work and my work. I will confirm with students which answers have mistakes after work is checked in. The second purpose is this eliminates copying from the answer key. Additionally, any other materials we use in class will be uploaded to Canvas. I look forward to having a great first quarter!

Honors Geometry

In geometry, we have already completed the first chapter of our curriculum, CPM! This curriculum encourages exploration and collaboration. The first chapter’s focus was on transformations (reflections, rotations, and translations) and what we can learn about shapes we create by using them. Chapter 2 has two sections. The first contains angle relationships and the Pythagorean Theorem, all of which will be critical in the proofs we will be doing this year. The second part of chapter 2 is about composite shapes. We use what we know about triangles, rectangles and more to find the perimeters and areas of shapes that do not have a special name. In chapter three we add an additional transformation to our set of tools - dilations. We use what we learned in chapters 1 and 2 to prove triangles are similar. At the end of the quarter we will use similar triangles to learn trigonometry. We are off to a great start!