8th Grade Team January Newsletter
January 6, 2023
Stay Up-to-Date with our Classrooms!
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, printed report cards will be sent home with students on Friday, January 13, 2023.
8th Grade Electives
Art
As we reached the end of the semester, 8th grade artists have done some neat final artwork. Many students teamed up and created fun tape sculptures using a method called “tape casting.” They made many cool figures and placed them throughout the school! Another art project that students made was the Multimedia project. After dividing their image up, students got to choose several mediums to shade/color their artwork. The result was interesting and unique. There were so many great artists and wonderful personalities this semester. As they move on from my class, I wish them all the very best!
Choir
At the end of last year, we had a wonderfully successful JH Holiday Choir Concert. Thank you to all who attended and also all who contributed to the Sugar Plum Lane fundraiser. We made over $1000 which is fantastic! 8th grade, you sang wonderfully at the concert as well.
In class, we are starting new music as we get into our “Pop Music” unit. Our next concert will have music of popular styles: musical theater, radio pop, rock, jazz, etc. The students are currently voting on their music in class and working hard to learn it before the next concert in February. 8th Grade Choir is also receiving their Pizza Party this week for almost doubling in size from last year. Congrats 8th graders!
Band
Congratulations to the 8th Grade Band for a wonderful Winter Concert. We will now be reading new music to make selections for our May concert. We are continuing to work on rhythmic literacy and how to use a tuner. We will also begin learning how to play in small ensembles.
PAYING IT FORWARD: We extend a big shout out to trumpet player Ella Gribbell!!! On her birthday she chose to go to downtown Dublin (in the COLD) and play Christmas Carols for donations. She surprised us with $90 to go to the JAJH Music Booster Fund. Thank you, Ella!!!
Engineering
Engineering students have finished the balsa wood bridge project! The students did great, with the average bridge holding nearly 50 pounds of weight! Congrats to Cam, Gavin, Brody, and Alex whose bridge held 112.5 pounds, only 5 pounds away from the all-time JAJH engineering record!
PE and Wellness
Students are learning fun new ways to modify games. This week they will be participating in giant volleyball and creating a game to go with it.
As new students come in for the following semester we will be learning the rules and how to act in the gym along with our normal routines. We will also be learning fun new games and bringing back some old games from previous years.
Technology
The students from the first half of the year are waving goodbye to their time in this class after having successfully leveled up with many different programs! In summation, they gained competency with programs like Frames, Google Spreadsheets, MIT App Inventor, the programming language Scratch and Google Sites. They also learned tools to become savvy online shoppers and to create pixel art. Congratulations! I’m looking forward to welcoming the next group of students who will finish the year with me.
World Languages and Cultures
¡Felíz Navidad! Joyeux Noël! Merry Christmas! ¡Prospero Año Nuevo! Bonne Année! Happy New Year! First semester students finished up the year with a French Test, a speaking assessment, and presentations about the French-speaking countries they chose. They created construction paper flags of the countries, and started their French Poster. They will create a poster that tells all about themselves in French, with pictures for each sentence so that even if you don’t speak French, you could figure out what the sentence is all about.
Next semester, a new group of students will start learning basic Spanish! We will focus on how to ask basic questions and work on pronunciation and the alphabet, and then start crafting our first Spanish conversation. Thank you so much, PTO, for your gifts!! We have already begun to use the construction paper, and everything was so generous.
8th Grade Core Classes
ELA
In 8th grade ELA, we are finishing Ghost Boys with a literary analysis essay on the theme. Then we will move on to Argumentative reading and writing. Students will be expected to analyze multiple non-fictional sources to determine the main idea and how supported that idea is with valid and relevant evidence. This will take a lot of critical thinking and perspective! By the end of the unit, students will be asked to craft their own arguments based on text sets provided by teachers. All students will be assigned a side of an argument but may provide a preference for a topic for their argumentative essay. Text topics may include but are not limited to eating bugs, graffiti, contact sports, electric cars, school start times, animal testing, video games, homework, social media, and college. Students are also able to submit their own ideas for topics.
Math and Algebra
8th Grade Math
Students will be wrapping up their unit on linear relationships and slope early next week. We will then start our Transformations unit, where students will draw on their knowledge of graphing in the coordinate plane. By graphing transformations and identifying the coordinates of their images, students will understand how these transformations affect the x and y coordinates of a preimage. Students will apply this understanding of using coordinate notation to determine the coordinates of an image from the coordinates of its preimage.
Ways to support your child’s understanding of transformations by discussing transformations in everyday life.
- Video Games: Discuss with your child how video game designers and programmers use geometric transformations when creating video games.
- Architecture: Discuss with your child how architects and engineers use geometric transformations when designing buildings and bridges.
- Interior Design: Discuss with your child how interior designers use geometric transformations when decorating spaces for commercial or residential use.
Algebra
Welcome back, algebra families!! This week students finished up our unit on data analysis and scatter plots. They did an excellent job and had a lot of fun with all of the real-world applications this unit entails. The second half of the year kicks off with chapter 7 over exponential functions. Students have already been exposed to this content a little bit throughout the year so I think they’ll find a lot of success with it. Major thing to note - up until this point, we’ve mostly focused on linear content (straight lines!). The second half of the year focuses on non-linear content and will be a little bit more challenging solely because the content is just a little bit different than what we are used to! The assessment for this chapter will not be until the very end of the month. Please access my canvas page for all of my chapter modules! They have my helpful resources, links, videos and parent guides!
Science
Welcome back! :)
We will continue our study of Plate Tectonics and the effects of plate interactions such as earthquakes and volcanoes.
Social Studies
Welcome back from break! Our classes will be continuing our previous learning about the American Revolution. Students will investigate the primary source document, the Declaration of Independence, and then begin learning about the war that took place between the Colonists and the British. Students will be assessed through various ways, and write an argumentative essay on which ideal is most important in the Declaration of Independence.