The middle school year is off to a wonderful start. Our seventh graders have jumped into their classes with curiosity, enthusiasm, and a willingness to take on new challenges. Here’s a glimpse of what students have been exploring and learning across their core academic classes during these first few weeks.
In math, students have been exploring a variety of problem-solving strategies to tackle challenging problems, including finding and using patterns, making lists and tables, drawing pictures, and working backward.
In English, seventh graders have jumped into their first novel, The Outsiders (a nostalgic choice, I know!), using close reading to look beyond what a text says explicitly and make inferences about characters based on their words, actions, thoughts, and interactions. Alongside their novel study, students have begun developing their own memoirs and are exploring how authors shape true-to-life experiences into compelling stories.
In History, they have been pondering why we study history. Students have begun exploring six themes of history to serve as the foundation of our understanding. They are starting the year in Ancient Rome, examining its rise and fall, the origins of Christianity, and the role it played in making the world a little more interconnected. The essential question for the year is: How did the distant regions of the world become more interconnected through medieval and early modern times?
In science, students have broken ground on our first unit of study: how rocks form and change. Seventh graders are investigating why rocks from the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains can have the same mineral composition even though they come from very different geographic regions. They have used hand lenses to make and record observations of a variety of rock types, run simulations to investigate how rocks form, and used hard candy as a physical model to explore the processes that form and break down rocks.