PAML Curriculum Update!

We are excited to introduce a new Curriculum Update feature in our family newsletter. Beginning with this edition and continuing every other newsletter, grade-level and Expos teachers will share a closer look at what students are learning in their classrooms. These updates will highlight key units of study, important skills and concepts being taught, learning experiences students are engaging in, and the ways teachers are assessing student growth. We hope this regular feature helps families better understand the meaningful learning taking place at each grade level and offers helpful ways to continue conversations about school at home.

Best,
Jes

UPCOMING EVENTS:

• Sep 1 - Meadow Farms Fundraiser

• Sep 14 - Picture Day

• Sep 21 - Yom Kippur (no school)

• Sep 30 - Open House

FUNDRAISER: We are implementing a 5th and 6th grade fundraiser, Meadow Farms. Students brought home the information on Tuesday, September 1.

The money and packets are due back to Ms. Zuke by September 21.

Here is their website: https://meadowfarms.com/

We are off and running! Our first unit on volume relies heavily on multiplication, so fact fluency is beneficial. We are using cubes to visualize, build, and analyze volume of rectangular prisms (fancy term for box!). I meet with different groups of students during class to check in and support their learning. Daily homeworks (none for the weekend) are designed to build independent practice and responsibility using review previously learned content.

Welcome to 5th grade science! We began the year tackling team building challenges which led us to think about the importance of roles and expectations in our science class. Students did a great job working together to solve a problem. The Monarch caterpillars arrived and we are practicing observing like a scientist. We are now responsible for keeping a living thing alive.

We have kicked off our school year by establishing our routines and expectations for Humanities. Additionally, we shared the book The Invisible Boy, which focuses on the concepts of identity, kindness and belonging. Students wrote and shared about gestures that would make a difference in their PAML Community. We have also been exploringThe Elements of Plot by reading books and short stories (including Thank You, M’am by Langston Hughes) and identifying the elements of plot as a whole group, in pairs and individually.

• Reading Logs are in effect! Please work with your child to develop the routine of reading for at least 20 minutes each day. (100 minutes per week minimum) The reading log should be signed by a parent/guardian and returned to school on the Monday of the following week. This will be a weekly grade in the gradebook, so please help to support your child in their quest for success!

Important Dates:

• 9/21: No School (Yom Kippur)

• 9/22: HW Club

• 9/29:HW Club

We are off to a great start, it has been wonderful to have this awesome group again. This year we are starting with geometry, it has been a lot of new learning for all.

The focus of the unit so far is finding area by decomposing and rearranging figures to make common shapes.

This week we were able to find right triangles outside, this led the students to realize the formula for finding the area of a triangle. We are also starting to identify parallelograms and how to find the area of them.

As a reminder we have homework Monday-Thursday, there is also HW Club on Tuesdays from 3-4.

Science has been so much fun this year! We started by considering the different ways people can observe the same object.

Our next step was to see how much more we could understand by observing something over a longer period. We discovered that by looking closely, hidden details were revealed that we missed at first glance. Our class was excited to share these discoveries and made connections to real-life experiences where they found success by investing extra time and energy into a task.

This week we are finishing our Science Posters, and next week we will start previewing the rest of the year.

Students have kicked off the year building our classroom community and exploring what Humanities means to them. Through new routines and reflection on their personal values, students are getting to know themselves and each other as we form our identity as a class.

We've also launched our reading logs and reviewed expectations. Our goal in middle school is to foster a culture of reading and support readers of all abilities. Research shows students become stronger, more engaged readers when they have time to read, opportunities to talk about books, models of routine reading from peers and adults, and exposure to new genres. Reading logs give families a structured way to help students build a consistent reading habit. While logs aren't a "graded" assignment on their own, they do factor into the Portrait of a Graduate Habits grade, which makes up 10% of the overall Humanities grade.

Over the past two weeks, students have been focused on Responsible and Compassionate as their Portrait of a Graduate (POG) Scholarly Habit. We reviewed what that might look like and sound like in a classroom setting and they will be self-assessing and then receiving a final grade from each teacher throughout the month.

In math, students are currently working on Unit 1: Scale Drawings. Our math curriculum is Illustrative math and they have a Family Support Page that you might find helpful. Students are exploring how to determine if a copy is a scaled copy, how to create a scaled copy from an original, and the relationship between scale and area.

They also took a basic math skills quiz and received their results. They should have chosen personal goals for skills that they need to work on and should be practicing for 15-20 minutes each evening. This document has links to practice sets for each skill that they should know, with the exception of the last three which they will be learning this school year.

Students have been working on making qualitative and quantitative observations, collecting data and learning how to graph their data. This week they are taking those skills outside as we collect data on bees on our PAML campus. We will be trying to answer “What can bees teach us about factors that affect living organisms?” as well as learning about how abiotic and biotic factors contribute to ecosystem biodiversity.

Our learning in ELA this year began with students thinking and reflecting about their reading and writing identities by creating a “Literacy Passport”. We then dove into our first standard which focuses on vocabulary. Students are learning ways to figure out the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases. We are practicing strategies for finding the meaning of words, such as determining parts of speech. Students are reviewing nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, interjections and conjunctions through an activity where they become the teacher to create a poster and lead a mini-lesson with a partner on one specific part of speech. Click HERE to learn a little more about our 7th Grade Reading Log expectations! We will visit the library as a class every other Friday.

Welcome Back! We are delighted to be back at Peoples Academy for another year of stellar learning! We hope all families had a relaxing and fantastic summer. We are ready to learn, grow and excel with your child. Please reach out with any questions, any time!

8th grade team:

Ryan VanDyk - Global Citizenship

Sarah Leister - Mathematics

Melissa Piscitelli - English

Megan Jolly - Science

David McKay - Special Educator

Kathy McKnight - Instructional Assistant

We have had a great start to math class in 8th grade. Students have been discovering rigid transformations and practicing how to perform them. We will have our first assessment this Friday. Students should be studying and practicing how to perform rigid transformations and how to prove congruence using rotations, translations, and reflections.

We have started our first unit on unequal heating of the Earth’s surface. This week we used infrared thermometers to measure the surface temperature of four different locations: grass, soil, water and pavement. Students have found the average temperatures of those places and we will be graphing that data next week. We have an all star group of scientists in 8th grade!

Students are working on learning classroom routines, stamina writing, current events and evaluating the foundations of a growth mindset and full effort classroom philosophy. Students will participate in a daily Word of the Week and will begin to analyze the elements of a Dystopian society.

Piscitelli: Welcome letter 2026-2027

Contact information:

melissapiscitelli@lamoillesouth.org

Students in GC are currently working on their Industrial Revolution unit vocabulary. Students will take an assessment on Thursday to ensure they have a solid understanding of the vocabulary before diving into our unit study. Next week, students will begin learning about the Industrial Revolution in America and how it has shaped the world we live in today.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email me: ryan.vandyk@lamoillesouth.org

Musicians in 5-6 and 7-8 chorus are hard at work preparing for their Rocktoberfest performance! Performers should meet Ms. MacNeil and Mrs. Leopold across from the Bijou at 9:30 on Saturday, September 26. This year’s theme is 90’s hits – chorus students, feel free to dress on theme or just wear something comfortable. Band students will be wearing the PA marching band uniforms. In chorus, we have also been working on part-singing and sight-reading skills, and band students just received their fall concert music to start practicing! Mark your calendars for the PAML chorus and band concert on Wednesday, October 22.

This quarter, the 5-6 and 7-8 musical theater classes, along with the 7-8 stage crew are collaborating on a production of Beetlejuice! Students stepped onstage this week for auditions, and received their parts on Wednesday. Stage crew have started planning for props, set pieces, costumes, and more. Now it’s time to dive into rehearsal!

8th graders in Wellness this quarter have been working on core skills of and SHAPE National standards “Decision Making” and “Goal Setting”. As part of this, we are considering the time, repetition and intention that goes into creating healthy habits as well as preventing or decreasing unhealthy habits. We also practiced making decisions using the “6 Hats” technique of looking at the possible outcomes of a decision from six different perspectives (facts/data, intuitive/gut, positives/benefits, negatives/risks, creative thinking/new ideas, big picture).

Our next unit is Erika’s Lighthouse Mental Health Level 2 (middle school). This is a depression awareness program and an introduction to recognizing signs and symptoms of when someone might need support or intervention for mental health concerns. The focus is on help-seeking behavior and promoting good mental health.

While lessons specific to puberty, sexual literacy and substance use/misuse are not anticipated to be the focus for a couple of weeks, questions and comments brought up in class at times result in unplanned conversations around these sensitive topics. Continue to look to this resource for more on what we are studying throughout the quarter.

Students across art classes have been busy experimenting with new materials, learning artistic techniques, and creating projects that showcase their unique ideas and creativity!

• Digital Art students have been exploring the possibilities of digital art using Canva and other digital tools. They have created digital collages, creative name designs, and redesigned photographs, while also practicing digital drawing techniques.

• Meet the Artist students have been inspired by some of the great artists of the past, including Vincent van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe. After learning about these artists, their lives, artistic styles, and sources of inspiration, students have used what they discovered to create their own beautiful and expressive masterpieces.

• Art Exploration students have been experimenting with a wide variety of materials and creative processes. Through drawing, watercolor, collage, and other hands-on projects, students are developing new skills while discovering different ways to express their ideas through art.

• Drawing students have been building a strong foundation of drawing skills. They have been learning about different drawing materials and techniques while practicing the important skills of observation, proportion, value, and shading.

• Painting students have been exploring a wide variety of watercolor techniques through creative projects and experimentation. Their beautiful watercolor silhouette paintings are currently on display in the hallways!

Computer Aiden Design (7th & 8th Grade)

The students started the quarter with learning the benefits and disadvantages of computer aided design (CAD) and reviewing the design tools of the software we use. For the time being, we are working with 2d software and the first goal will be to create a basic mechanism that will be, in part, fabricated with the help of the laser cutter.

Design Engineering 1 (7th & 8th Grade)

The group began the 1st quarter with the "Transportation Safety" unit. In the coming weeks, the students will dive into the world of transportation safety and engineering. They'll understand the importance of safe transportation with a variety of transportation vehicles while learning about and applying fundamental engineering concepts. The highlight of the course is a hands-on project in which students design, build, and test model cars to protect two hard-boiled eggs during a simulated crash. This experience allows the students to practice problem-solving skills, teamwork, and creativity, ensuring the students not only learn but also have fun along the way.

Design Engineering 2 (7th & 8th Grade)

The group of students started the 1st quarter with learning about power tool safety and how to use the bandsaw and the drill press safely. Once this is completed the students will transition to studying high speed transportation, what it takes to go fast, why it is sometimes better to not go so fast, and how to move a vehicle efficiently at any speed. For their hands-on project the students will design and build a little CO2 dragster, this year with a slight twist: No rules! This is the unlimited version.