Brooklyn L. has been awarded 1st Place in the 2010 Martin Luther King Jr. Essay Contest.
The Indiana Association of School Principals in partnership with The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is proud to recognize Brooklyn L. as this year’s winner of the Junior Division. Brooklyn will receive passes to the Children’s Museum for her and her family, a letter, certificate and a $500.00 cash prize.
Way to go Brooklyn!
The teams for our Movie Maker project have been posted. Everyone will be working on a specific section of the movie for our digital yearbook. The teams have members in all four different class periods and have to work individually and collaboratively to complete their portion of the project on time. There are two forms of communication between teams:
Poster Sticky Notes on the front board in the classroom
Moodle Forums
Both must be updated at the end of each class period each day so that the team leader can coordinate efforts.
Wow, we have nine more 7th graders to honor for their writing efforts this year.
Katelyn, Tessa, Keeley, Bradley, Zayne, Brandon N., Mea, Taylor and Hunter have each had a poem selected for publication in A Celebration of Poets by Creative Communications. Their work will be published in the upcoming anthology and are still eligible to be selected as one of the Top Ten poems and awards of more than $2000.00 in prizes. Congratulations!
Today was a writing workshop for everyone, as the second writing assignment for the grading period is due tomorrow at the beginning of class. Mrs. Scales conferenced with writers and everyone was reminded to have the correct color-coded checklist signed by parents.
Today we finished recording all of our final oral project clips. Everyone had a chance in the recording studio. Anyone who was not ready or absent from school needs to see Mrs. Scales about coming in before or after school to make up their recording time.
Tomorrow is a writing workshop day. Wednesday is the final due date for our second writing assignment for this, our last, grading period.
Today we took the test over The Little Prince. The whole test was just filling out an 8th grade AR Summary. The difference between the 8th grade AR Summary and the 7th grade AR Summary is that the you have to identify the specific elements of the plot, not just summarize the plot. We had already talked about the conflict, climax, themes and resoultion during class discussion. We had also done a packet in class last Friday that covered all of the information asked for on the test.
Mrs. Scales reminded us that with our returned summary we can take the AR test over The Little Prince. The AR test is a reading comprehension test and worth 2 AR points. We talked a little about the difference between a reading comprehension test in which you have to know what happened in the story and the kind of literary element identification test that we just took.
Anyone who did not score a 40 or higher on the test can turn in the completed packet with a corrected AR Summary to recieve some of the points they lost on the test.
After the test, we went back to the K-W-L charts we began last week in our packets. The K colum had already been completed. Today we brainstormed ideas for the W colum, what we want to know about operas. Several questions were explored, including:
Do they sing everything?
Why and/or how do they sing so loud?
What is the difference between a musical and an opera?
Finally, Mrs. Scales asked who had ever been to an opera before. Only one person in the 7th grade said they had ever been to an opera. So then we began watching our first opera together.