We have had quite a month since our last blog here in Room 8 at St. Pius School.
Our 8th graders collected more box tops in the month of February than any class has in the entire school for the entire year. 1,536 strong! Way to go!
Both our boys and girls varsity basketball teams placed second out of eight teams as they hosted the annual St. Pius basketball tournament. Nice work, teams!
Grandparents Day here at St. Pius was a hit for all who attended. The eighth grade put on "Goldielocks on Trial," a performance based on "Goldielocks and the Three Bears." After just a day of rehearsal, they did a great job and had the audience in stitches.
Onto academics...
Eighth Grade Vocabulary: We are currently reviewing Units 7-9. Beginning the week of March 14, Unit 10 will be covered. Unit 10's words are: accord, barter, curt, devise, dexterous, engross, entail, ferret, habituate, impending, personable, rue, scoff, transition, trepidation, upbraid, veritable, vex, vitality, and whimsical.
Eighth Grade Math: My math class is in the middle of Ch. 6: Stystems of Linear Equations and Inequalities. This basically means finding the solution to two equations, or finding out where those two lines would cross on a grid.
Eighth Grade Language Arts: We just finished writing a Compare/Contrast essay where students had to take two items (Coke and Pepsi, spring and fall, etc) and give similarities and differences of those items. We just began working on verbals, which are words that are formed from a verb and acts as a noun, adjective, or adverb. Examples are gerunds (Writing a book is hard work.) and infinitives (The fair is a place I would like to visit).
Eighth Grade Literature: Red Badge of Courage is our final novel of the year. It is about a young soldier caught in the middle of the Civil War and his attempts at coming to terms with his emotions of battle, fatigue, and comraderie.
Seventh Grade Math: We just began studying ratios, proportions and similar figures. An example is if a basketball player made 5 baskets in 10 attempts, he makes one out of two shots, or 1/2, or 5:10.
Seventh Grade Language Arts: We just finished writing a paper where we replicate our favorite author's style. To practice, we formed groups, wrote stories in the form of authors we have alreay read (Mark Twain, SE Hinton, etc.) and performed those stories as a skit. Next we will be studying pronouns.
Seventh Grade Literature: We are nearing the end of Mark Twain's legendary, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." This will also be our third and final novel of the year. Our others were "Our Town," by Thornton Wilder and "The Outsiders," by SE Hinton.
