7TH GRADE NEWS

LANGUAGE ARTS AND HISTORY:

Seventh graders are steadily writing their DAR essays for the annual contest offered by the Lonestar DAR chapter. St. James students have participated in the DAR essay contest for the last 5 years. This year’s topic, women’s suffrage, is proving to be challenging and interesting to the students, according to student D.P. The students must imagine that they are living in 1919, at the height of the suffrage movement and Congressional passage of the 19th Amendment. Each student has created a character to discuss the pros and cons of women’s suffrage on American society from that character’s perspective. Not only did 7th graders research the origins of women’s suffrage in America and use note-taking strategies to gather pertinent facts, but they also have converted their notes into an organized format and then inserted their opinions to create a cohesive and expressive essay. Students are deftly combining three different writing styles--narrative, expository, and persuasive--into one essay. How amazing that a multitude of skills are utilized to produce just a few pages!

MATH AND SCIENCE:

St. James 7th graders had a very unique and rare learning opportunity in Science. They’ve been studying anatomy recently. Dr. Benjamin DuBois and Dr. Jason Yost conducted a lab in which they guided our students through the process of dissecting hearts. A cow heart and two pig hearts were donated by a local butcher shop. The doctors were able to help them actually see and touch the things they’ve been studying.

It was an amazing experience being able to see the details of the muscles, the intricacies of the arteries and veins, and establish with visual understanding the actual flow of our blood through the heart and our bodies. Thank you very much, Drs. DuBois and Yost! The students, and teachers alike, learned many things and have a deeper level of understanding of the circulatory system.