7TH GRADE NEWS

LANGUAGE ARTS AND HISTORY:

Seventh grade completed its poetry unit with a study of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven.” After reading it aloud, students practiced identifying the figurative language techniques used in the poem and then chose a task to complete. One student chose to rewrite the opening stanza as the first paragraph of a spooky story, and two students chose to deconstruct the poem and storyboard each stanza with illustrations. This task required the students to sum up each stanza in one sentence, which is a great way to show understanding of the plot of this 18 stanza-long poem. Then, they divided paper into 18 boxes and drew illustrations to coordinate with the sentences. This assignment challenged the students to pay attention to detail; now they will know “The Raven” “evermore”.

MATH AND SCIENCE:

Snap!

When games like Fortnite and movies such as Endgame have captured kids’ attention, why not use their interests for academic purposes? Our students have been creating and sharing games to review key vocabulary terms in science, and we’ve stumbled upon a relatively new online game platform called Gimkit. This game was itself designed by a high school student to make classroom review more engaging, and he did just that by making “Thanos Mode” available for a limited time. Students answer questions and earn [imaginary] money for correct responses. They can then use the money to purchase upgrades to increase their earning power. In Thanos Mode, students purchase a series of six Infinity Stones of increasing value--the first stone is $5 and the last is $150,000. The first student to acquire all six stones is the winner and gets to “snap” half of the class (apparently this is a trademark move for the legendary Thanos)...we were all on the edge of our seats waiting to see who survived the snap!