8th Grade Team December Newsletter

Staying connected to our families is important to our teachers. In addition to the front page of our Canvas courses, we are excited to share this monthly newsletter with our families to keep you aware of upcoming events, activities, lessons, units, and materials from our classes! The 8th Grade Team has compiled this newsletter to share some of the upcoming experiences your student will be having with us. As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact your child's teachers!

As a reminder, the 2nd Quarter will end on Friday, January 6th.

Art students recently wrapped up some acrylic painting. We painted our clay sculptures as well as a personal canvas board. For the canvas board assignment, students had the freedom to paint anything they wanted to! They just had to challenge themselves and do something that included mixing/matching colors, as well as matching values (light and dark areas) with a source image. I was pleased with the wonderful paintings that were created!

7th & 8th Grade Holiday Choir Concert

Tuesday, December 13th @ 6:30 p.m.

in the Jonathan Alder High School Auditeria

This is a dress-up occasion.

Guys: Nice Shirt (preferably collared), Nice Pants and Nice Shoes.

Girls: Nice Shirt, Nice Skirt/Dress of modest length or Pants, and Nice Shoes.

**No Flip-flops, Shorts, T-shirts, or Jeans***

Doors will open by 6:00 pm

Choir should show up to the HS Choir Room by 5:30 PM

This concert is a required event and is a large portion of the student’s grade for this 9-weeks.

We look forward to performing for you and seeing you there!

7th & 8th Grade Band Winter Concert

Tuesday, December 6th @ 7:00 p.m.

in the Jonathan Alder High School Auditeria

This is a dress-up occasion.

Guys: Nice Shirt (preferably collared), Nice Pants and Nice Shoes.

Girls: Nice Shirt, Nice Skirt/Dress of modest length or Pants, and Nice Shoes.

**No Flip-flops, Shorts, T-shirts, or Jeans***

Doors will open by 6:00 pm

8th Grade Band should leave cases in the Choir Room and report to the Stage by 6:15pm.

This concert is a required event and is a large portion of the student’s grade for this 9-weeks.

We look forward to performing for you and seeing you there!

Sometimes, good design takes time, and we are certainly learning that this quarter with our bridge projects! Students have finished their SolidWorks models of their bridges, and it is finally time to build with balsa wood and glue! Testing is scheduled for December 14th, and we’re excited to see how much our bridges can hold!

As we go into December, students in PE will be participating in floor hockey, basketball, and working more on cardiovascular goals. In wellness, students will be learning about mental illnesses, ways to improve their well-being in and outside of school, and working on anti-bullying posters.

We are very excited to be deep in our big cumulative project for the final nine weeks, Playing Is Fun! Students are broken into groups of three and are busily working to program, design, and sell an original video game to a fictional video game studio. They’re learning real-world skills in coding, art, and research.

Students have been learning French! They have waited so long to start learning French, and now we’re in the thick of it! We have learned how to ask and answer questions such as, “What is your name?”; “How do you spell your name?”; “How are you?”; “What are you like?”; and we are starting to learn our numbers. We are working on pronunciation and writing out the pronunciation for every word because sometimes you don’t pronounce the whole word in French, unlike in Spanish. We are able to make lots of great connections between Spanish and French now that we know basic Spanish! We speak French every day in class and are getting used to the sounds. We will complete our French conversation soon and learn about the 29 French-speaking countries!

Students celebrated the hard work they put into their research blogs by participating in a grade-wide “Bloggie Award” ceremony. Each class selected a winner in “Most Creative,” “Most Informative,” and “Most Interesting,” and then went head to head against the winners from other classes. Classes are now moving into a novel unit on “Ghost Boys” by Jewell Parker Rhoades. Students will be tracking themes in the book, along with the central ideas of paired nonfiction articles. Please remind your student to check their grades regularly and complete any missing work.

The Accelerated ELA class has started its historical fiction book clubs. Student groups selected a time or event in history and will be comparing a historical fiction novel to the real events. Groups will be putting together the information they find in a variety of ways to present to the class.

Math 8

Students completed Module 3 this week and will begin Module 4. The goal is to have this module completed by the time we leave for winter break. In Module 4, Linear Relationships and Slope, students will draw on their knowledge of unit rates and proportional relationships to understand slope and will use similar triangles to explain why the slope is the same between any two points on a line. They will explore similarities and differences between linear and proportional models, and explore the linear equation y = mx + b.

How can you provide support?

1. Support your child’s understanding of linear equations by asking them to explain how they can use reasoning about slope in everyday life.

• Price/Banking: Ask your child about price/banking rates increases and decreases - if something increases at a steady rate, where will it end up? What if it decreases?

• Stairs: When you encounter a staircase, ask your child to estimate its rise and run. Discuss how the staircase might be different if the run was increased or decreased.

1. Encourage your child to have a positive, growth-oriented attitude towards mathematics and their learning.

• Encourage them to ask questions – both at home and in class. Sometimes, an answer to a question will generate more questions. That’s how you know they are learning!

• Encourage your child to embrace challenges and remind them that every challenge is an opportunity to learn something new.

Algebra

Students finished up their unit on sequences today! They really did an amazing job and I am so proud of how hard they worked on this new topic! Coming up next week, we’ll be working on data analysis and how to use our graphing calculators to graph and compare data. I have a class set of calculators that students can use but if they have their own, please make sure they start bringing it to class regularly (and charged!) if they aren’t already doing so. Our actual chapter 6 assessment will be after winter break but that unit is mini and won’t be too intense! Coming up before Winter Break (I CAN’T BELIEVE IT) is the Midterm!! I’ll give two days for the assessment - Wednesday 12/12 & Thursday 12/13. I sent home an optional Midterm review packet today if kiddos wanted to get a jump start on reviewing but no pressure. We will have two full days of review in class as well. The midterm covers chapters 1-5. If students are doing their homework and participating actively on warm ups, they are CONSTANTLY seeing old content from the beginning of the year and should not feel overwhelmed! We got this! Please access all of my canvas modules for additional practice, videos, parent guides, etc. and of course, never hesitate to contact me with any questions.

Students are investigating how our earth has continued to change over time and how the movement of tectonic plates results in events such as earthquakes and the eruption of volcanoes such as Mauna Loa. We are currently “diving deeper” into specific plate interactions and the events that result from these interactions.

Students will be starting our next unit in class about the American Revolution! Students will spend the next couple of weeks learning about the different causes of the American Revolution, beginning with the French and Indian War. Students will be assessed on the French and Indian War, and will be creating poster presentations on a specific cause of the American Revolution. All of this information leads us to covering the Declaration of Independence, and then eventually War!