Congratulations to the LCMA orchestra on receiving straight superiors at their music performance assessment on Friday, February 22,2019. Please feel free to enjoy their performance by watching it on my website. ( My personal favorite song played is El Toro.)
https://www.lcmamusic.com/Orchestra If you see any of these students around, please be sure to congratulate them on their huge success at the Chapter Mathcounts Competition on Saturday!
Our 4-man team consisting of Jacob Gmitter, Jimmy Barrios, Raghav Bansal, and Nicholas Kieffer took 1st place for the team round and 1st place for the ciphering round! Indivudally, out of 127, here’s how our students ranked! Nicholas Kieffer- 1st Jimmy Barrios- 2nd Raghav Bansal- 9th Jacob Gmitter -13th Eesh Sahay – 14th Mohon Nakka- 22nd Pranav Gunjala- 24th Alexander Andrade (our only 6th grader!) – 25th Anna Cheng- 38th Luv Patel- 67th And Krishna Patel participated as the alternate and unfortunately they do not give us his scores. Orchestra students are working to prepare for this week’s music performance assessment and are also preparing for our upcoming collaborative concert with Trans-Siberian Orchestra member Mark Wood.
Chorus students are also preparing for their upcoming MPA which takes place on March 20. The music department is excited to perform at the black history festival next week and are learning and performing songs by celebrated artists such as Bill Withers and Ben E. King. Mrs. Tregler’s 8th Grade American History cluster classes chose a significant African Americans to research and create websites. Other classes are then using these websites in the next few weeks to gone on a Black History Month scavenger hunt. Mr. Rutledge’s classes are working on an arts integration project to show their knowledge of key ideas and influences of Jacksonian democracy. Students are getting creative while using a variety of media to show what they know!This week is about diversity and differentiation. Student volunteers are working hard, gearing up for the first Black History Festival, while working on our "Arts Integration" lesson for Andrew Jackson. Students are creating an arts-infused product of their choosing from varying perspectives (African American, Jackson's wife, etc.), which will be centered around this controversial president. 6th grade Language and Literature students have been digging in deep to the connotation of words. How does the context of the lines of a poem affect the meaning the author wanted to get across to the reader? Also, they have been learning about figurative language and analyzing why author's would choose certain phrases and the effect they have on a text. 7th grade Language and Literature students used music as a way to see figurative language in poetry. They designed presentations to discuss how the songwriter's word choice affected the tone and how the musical notes and beats could change the tone or reemphasize the tone. Students also have been analyzing narrative poetry for rhyme schemes and rhythm patterns and sharing how the structure of the text affects the meaning. Mr. Coombs' 6th grade classes are rolling along studying energy through creating roller coasters and identifying the types of energy and the forces involved. Eighth grade is burning for knowledge about the sun, so they are making models of the sun's structure. Creative Technology students are using their Design Cycle skills to create their own designs from concept to completion! We have projects ranging from online games to creating a new water filter to 3D printing a hockey helmet! The students are learning designing is fun as well as educational!! Creative Writing & Drama: After days spent reviewing the "Rules of Paragraphing (TiPToP) and Dialogue," our 6th grade students began writing their first original fiction story. It is based on five random items brought in by a classmate for the activity "Story in a Shoe Box." Early rough drafts demonstrate that our 6th graders have a strong command of vocabulary, figurative and sensory language, and imagery. As a reminder, strong readers make strong writers! Seventh graders are putting the finishing touches on their original "Tall Tale." These stories have been entertaining as they follow the steps of: an interesting childhood, conflict/competition, humor, and hyperbole (exaggeration). Next, the students will be converting either their original fable or tall tale into an illustrated children's story that we will share with a local elementary school. Our eighth graders are "hitting the boards" as they present their interpretation of the scripts "My Hero" or "Weird." It's always entertaining to watch our students come out of their comfort zones and become new and interesting characters. A written reflection regarding the script, characters, and performance will follow. Algebra students have been learning how to solve quadratic equations and graph quadratic functions. They have learned that quadratic functions are the perfect models for any trajectory that has a parabolic shape. Geometry classes just wrapped up their study of basic trigonometry and continue to apply that knowledge to find unknown dimensions in quadrilaterals. 8th grade science students just completed researching and building 3D models of the Sun. Each model includes an informational legend and all of the major solar structures. Attached are some examples of some of the amazing creativity these small groups display on a regular basis! Civics students have been learning about the judicial branch. They have learned about different kinds of cases and different levels of courts. They even participated in a mock trial where the jury had to render a verdict in the case Humpty Dumpty v. Sherman King. We have some great actors and actresses in our midst! We are currently looking at landmark Supreme Court cases and learning how they set precedents for future court cases. The Environmental Symposium students have been sharing the Crayola ColorCycle Project with neighboring elementary schools to save over 400 million dried up markers from landfills and oceans. Please come see the Honey Bunch team at First Friday! As they meet their Final Challenge of the Lexus Eco Challenge, they will be selling Bee Hotels and seed bombs, along with educating the community about the importance of our honey bees! The Gifted Elective students will be showing off their solutions at the regional Odyssey of the Mind tournament on March 2nd at Bloomingdale High School in Valrico. Creativity at it’s best! We are preparing for Concert MPA in Symphonic Band, Jazz Band is preparing for performances at the Black Heritage Festival, and the Polk Fine Arts Festival in March. Lavelle's classes have been familiarizing themselves with the visual aspects and utter desperation of the Dust Bowl through iconic photographs and scenes from the Ken Burns documentary of the same name. They have begun reading aloud from Karen Hesse's novel-in-verse, Out of the Dust, winner of the John Newbery Medal. Students are examining the ways in which the individual poems work together in order to structure the novel. Students will also experiment with the intricacies of Hesse’s structure by taking lines from one poem and applying their meaning to various other places in the novel. When they have finished reading and discussing, they will work in groups to determine how the meaningful structure of the novel compares and/or contrasts with that of other pieces concerning the Dust Bowl, such as excerpts from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, and Sanora Babb’s Whose Names are Unknown. Congratulations to the following students for making high ratings at the choral solo and ensemble event this past weekend!
|
Archives
May 2019
Categories |