Student Council worked to provide an excellent service learning opportunity for eighth grade and high school students on Friday, April 5th. These students, along with Mr. Powers and Mrs. Smith, took the afternoon to go to the Fairbanks Community Center and volunteer in their garden and flower beds. Before we began working, Emilee from Fairbanks took time to explain to our group the importance of the community center in its neighborhood, providing services to those in need. Our group worked on pulling weeds, beautifying a playground, and spreading mulch. During this time, students in 6th and 7th grades helped out around school, volunteering to help teachers and Mr. Mike with tasks.
Sixth grade students are making wonderful progress in learning about the sectional crisis leading up the Civil War. Over the past week we have studied the ways in which westward expansion caused a rift in the United States. These sixth graders are doing a wonderful job making connections between these lessons and things we have studied over the past several months, showing great recall. They are growing in their note-taking skills and in their abilities to make arguments based in evidence, and I’m so proud of them!
This week students in seventh and eighth grade are learning about Jacksonian America and the many reform movements that took place during that time. This era is rich in reform, but it also introduces the ideas of manifest destiny and westward expansion, all building up to a crisis in the United States.
Seventh grade students who are studying geography were able to spend some time exploring the Google Cardboard virtual reality app last Thursday.
High school students are presenting on the New Era and the Great Depression in class on Tuesday. Students each chose a topic and will take 2-3 minutes presenting to their classmates the background and significance of their chosen topic. On Thursday, our class will continue learning about the Great War, with a more global focus than last week when we heard from a guest speaker at the Springfield-Greene County Library about Springfield’s Impact on the Great War.
