Tuesday, February 24 & Thursday, February 26, 2026

• 3:45 -4:45 pm: Collaboration between teachers & families by phone to learn about your students' progress at Irving. 

• 4:45-6:45 pm: Drop in conferences to to learn about your students progress at Irving

• Elective/ACES & PE/Health teachers: Conferences in the cafeteria

• 6th Grade teachers: Conferences in the library

• 7th grade teachers: Conferences on the 2nd floor 

• 8th grade teachers: Conferences on the 3rd floor

8th Grade students have all registered for high school courses.  If you have any questions about their registration or 9th grade, please let me know and I will connect you with their high school counselor.  

A few things to remember as we continue 8th Grade:

• Study skills are important in middle school and more so in high school!  If your student needs help with homework, studying for a test or catching up - have them attend Homework Hub.  Teachers are there M, W, Th, and F to help our Aarvarks be their best!

• Be Safe, Be Respectful and Be Responsible!  Keep practicing these school wide expectations.

• Ask questions!  If you need any information about high school - ask us!  We want to send our 8th Graders to high school prepared and ready for SUCCESS!

Janis Fiero - 8th Grade Counselor (jfiero@lps.org)

We are at the end of our focus on slavery in America. The basic things the kids should know are: 1) The economics of cotton, the south and slavery, 2) What was life like for enslaved people and 3) what sorts of things did enslaved people do to resist. In Bayne’s classes the students reflected on the resistance efforts of Ann Williams and Nat Turner. In Steen and Davison’s class, the students do a biography on someone who resisted slavery. After the unit on slavery, we turn our attention to the division happening in the country in the 1850s.

We are reading our in class novels and working on gathering evidence for our upcoming Argument DCA.Diff. English is finishing Just Mercy and will complete a short research project that goes with the story before writing their Argument DCA. 

On-level English continues to read Wolf Hollow and analyze the different components of the story. They will write their Argument DCA during the first week of March.

We are about halfway through Chapter 8 - Exponents and Scientific Notation. We will be testing over this material Feb 26-27. There will be opportunities for practice at home (Check Your Understanding Packets) most weeks. We will have lots of in-class practice as well. 

Chapter 6 focuses on Scatter Plots. We look at how they are a model of data that we can use to make predictions. We are learning to describe associations, draw lines of best fit, write equations of those lines, find residuals, and observe upper and lower bounds. Chapter 6 assessment is a group project instead of a test. Students have been working on their projects this week, with presentations on Thursday, February 12 and Friday February 13. The Chapter 5 Retention Test is scheduled for Thursday,  February 19.

Chapter 8 Focuses on properties of Polygons and Circles. We are learning how to find measures of central angles, interior angles, and exterior angles of various polygons. We will also compare the area and perimeter of similar polygons. Lastly, we will begin to explore attributes of circles. Chapter 8 Test (with Chapter 7 Retention) will be on February 26-27.

We are in our astronomy unit.  Students are learning about the planets, our star, and other objects in our solar system. Students are doing calculations in order to make a scale model of the solar system.