According to the reports, our students are interviewing people all over Vermont and recording their stories as part of our “Heart of the Mountains” Ethnography project. I look forward to hearing and seeing the footage in January!

Last week students were given this Ethnography Survival Guide, which I encourage you to look over as we support our students in this challenging task. In it, you’ll see a full project description, a timeline for completion of the project, and various tips and tricks to pull off successful interviewing, recording, and editing. We have been working with the concept of storyboarding. When all footage is gathered, it is the responsibility of the student to place each snippet of recorded material in an order that tells an engaging, coherent, and true story of the Vermont Community. We practiced this storyboarding concept with these exercises in class (Spongebob Storyboard / Actions Storyboard). Feel free to ask your kids about them!

After listening to "The Veldt" last week, students have spent several lessons taking apart many of the story elements we are learning. They've been working in teams and improving their discussion skills as well.

This week we read "The Dinner Party" by Mona Gardner and "The Last Leaf" by O. Henry, and we continued to investigate story by watching a great introduction to storyboarding, created by the production team at Pixar responsible for the first Toy Story movie and for the amazing storytelling traditions of that company.

This week started with a summative assessment on similar figures, finding and applying a scale factor, and making connections on the scale factor's affect on perimeter and area. Then students were given real world problems where scale factor and similarity would be used to solve unknown distances.

I hope you all enjoy this holiday season!

We made the jump this week into topics in Ecology. We connected our previous learning about water quality to biomes and the way water influences landscapes and the creatures that live around it, by watching two episodes from the BBC produced "Planet Earth." The second episode focused on how plants and animals are uniquely adapted to the environment they live in. We capped off the week by creating "Ugly Sweaters." Students were creatively challenged to illustrate a vocabulary term or concept we have learned about this year and design an ugly sweater!

We have officially concluded our economics unit by sharing economic case studies in the form of 1-minute presentations. These intriguing presentations have integrated economic concepts into topics of interest for each student.

This week, as a product of our work with the Vermont Folklife Center and the Middle Grades Collaborative, we have become acquainted with ethnography, a method of studying history, events, and culture based on first-hand accounts. As part of this project, students will be recording interviews with family members or people they may know from the community who they feel can talk about their chosen topic. In doing so, each student will tell a story that captures the heart and soul of the Vermont community. I encourage you to discuss possible ideas with your children. The project itself is straightforward, but logistics can get a bit more complicated depending on how ambitious students are. Safety is a top priority and I appreciate your support as students make those connections. If you have any ideas, questions, or suggestions please let me know.

It's remarkable how much we can learn about our community and our history by listening to each other tell stories.

At the beginning of our Ethnography Unit, students have been discovering some fascinating examples of folklife research, oral history, and journalism--including interviews with Daisy Turner, a Vermonter who was the child of former slaves and who lived to age 104. They also explored the archives of Studs Terkel and the Story Corps.

A key lesson this week was recognizing the role of editing/mixing in clearly expressing a story arc. I can't wait to hear this year's student projects!

Students were introduced to the Wumps this week. They created similar and nonsimilar figures using a coordinate system and graphed members of the Wump family, plus other figures claiming to be in the Wump family. They noticed that members of the Wump family were similar to one another and the nonsimilar figures were imposters. Students then made connections between the coordinate rules and the shapes that resulted. Check out some of their work!

Students are working diligently to finish writing their lab report about water quality! Although it’s been a bit challenging to learn this new style of writing, students have persevered with the task and are creating some really nice looking reports. The writing was “chunked,” so students tackled one section each class. After we reviewed examples and guidelines in class, students had class time to begin work. Class time was also used to model what to write using the guidelines, and each class composed much of the first three sections together. Students are currently writing the "Discussion" section, using a Claim-Evidence-Reasoning format to tell what they think the water quality of the Lozelle Brook is, using evidence from our investigation. We are working to complete the final drafts by next Friday, 12.13.

This week, students demonstrated their knowledge of productive resources through an inquiry assignment. For this, each student will chose a product, did some research on how this product is made, and then laid out the production process in a digital infographic. For each step, they will also list the natural, human, and capital resources that are used in production.

We also took a look at the idea of ‘standard of living’ - the things that make a country worth living in. How can we measure such a thing? To help us answer this, we considered the concepts of Gross Domestic Product and GDP per capita.

This week students have been encouraged to think of themselves as individuals. The personalized learning pathways that are available in high school are often bigger decisions, yet now 7th graders are already recognizing that we each bring personal qualities into the lessons.

In English, there are opportunities for students to make choices during units based on their own interests, goals and challenges. Students are writing either a Citizen Science Narrative or a Creative Writing project inspired by our hero, Calpurnia Tate!

Ready for the student-led conferences this week, students also crafted personal and academic WOOP goals--so you can look forward to hearing about those!

Students have been reinforcing their understanding with integers. Here, they're conferring and collaborating with each other. They share their thinking and strategies on how they approach various integer problems. Students also spend time sharing how various models help them to arrive at their solutions. Currently, we're now adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing integers.

In addition to their math work, students have also spent some time reflecting on their individual MAP scores in preparation for student-led conferences.

We are continuing our investigation around watersheds and their impacts on the surrounding environment. We are reviewing the water cycle and the importance of protecting the fresh water available on Earth. We are beginning to understand the results from the chemical testing for pH, dissolved oxygen, nitrates, phosphates and coliform bacteria. After we uncover how the biological, physical and chemical indicators of the stream contribute to the overall health of the Lozelle, students will begin writing a formal lab report to communicate their findings about the health of the brook. For many students, this will be one of the first scientific reports they have written. I will “chunk” the report, and we will tackle a section each day. Students will have the entire class time to compose their findings for each section, and unfinished work for each section is expected to be completed as homework. A copy of the water quality lab report guidelines can be found here. We are also reviewing the water cycle and the importance of protecting the fresh water available on Earth.

With the Invest in Yourself, we've officially moved into the universally relevant topic of Economics: the science of choice. So far, we’ve examined the concept of scarcity, the foundation of economics. Often, the choices we must make are related to our limited resources (time, money, etc.). While we can all agree that it is better to buy “needs” rather than “wants”, our classroom spectrum activity showed that because of our differing values, not everyone agrees on what qualifies as a “need”.

To synthesize these basic economic concepts, each student reflected on a challenging decision they have had to make in the past. While some of these decisions only had immediate implications (chocolate or vanilla?), others were a little further reaching (which class to take?). Many students concluded that there was indeed a limited resource that forced them to make these decisions.

“Callie’s struggles to find a place in the world where she’ll be encouraged in the gawky joys of intellectual curiosity are fresh, funny, and poignant today.”—The New Yorker

In English this week, students have learning goals in both writing and reading. In their food writings and in the "Letter from Your Future Self" prompts from Social Studies, students showed readiness to work on improving their longer sentences, so we are going to practice combining simpler thoughts into longer sentences this week.

Meanwhile as students read The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate we are going to practice new ways of tracking the 'signposts'--this time in an exciting form called sketchnoting.

In math class this week students are taking a deeper look into how subtracting integers works. They have plenty of models to choose from now to help them make sense of and represent their thinking. These students are using one of our Math Habits, Critique and Debate, to justify their mathematical thinking with each other. The week will end with students participating in a Partner Quiz to formally assess their progress.

Students continue to work on the classification project! This project has proven to be a great time to practice perseverance and self-direction! We have had to problem-solve keeping track of collected leaves and flowers, pictures that won’t send, weird formatting on digital projects, and how to navigate dense, scientific vocabulary….the list goes on! But, students are overcoming these obstacles and forging ahead with great focus! I’ve continued to host “student appointments” to check in and support students in their work. The classification project is due Friday, October 18th!

On Tuesday, October 22nd, we will have the opportunity to work with a few scientists from the VT EPSCoR Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD) to explore the biotic factors (macroinvertebrates) in the Lozelle Brook on campus. Students should be dressed for the elements and prepared to go outside!

Can money buy happiness? This week, students will reflect on this age-old question. In thinking about the lifestyle they desire for their future, students will also consider the financial ramifications. As examples we will talk about the exciting lifestyle of Adrian Carton de Wiart, the extravagant lifestyle of Ty Warner, the money-free lifestyle of Daniel Suelo, and an average middle class lifestyle. Though opinions will vary, many students will state that money does not directly buy happiness, but that it is a contributing factor (i.e. if you spend it on things you need, if you spend it on other people, etc.) This opens up the opportunity for conversations at home, and I encourage you to ask your children what their take is on the issue.

At the end of this week, students will begin wrapping up this unit with a short writing assignment. From twenty years in the future, students will write a letter to their present selves. In this letter, they will describe the lifestyle they are living in 2039, and explain how the things they do in seventh grade helped them to get to that point.

Writers Workshop begins this week in English! Students will share their work-in-progress as an early draft and then ask for specific feedback from team members. After reading Anton Chekhov's 'Oysters' and an excerpt from Roald Dahl's Boy the students will develop their food writings with sensory description, dialogue, and character actions to recreate scenes from their point of view.

The tool-of-choice for most of our revision effort is the 'commenting' function on Docs, but students are also arranged into face-to-face small groups so they can have personal conversations as well. These soft skills--like eye contact and tone of voice--are as much a part of our early curriculum as the literary devices we are studying now.

Both the soft skills and the literary devices we are learning about now will continue to be reinforced in future book groups, readings, and eventually in Harkness Discussions.

Look for more info on the Harkness Dialogue method in future newsletters!

We are continuing with our Accentuate the Negative unit. We'll be reinforcing our understanding of adding integers with card games, Race to 25 and 1,2,3 Switch. We will also move into exploring subtraction with integers and rational numbers. We will be using chip models to help with our understanding and model our thinking. Then, later in the week we'll meet the "mathmaster chefs" as we explore integers using hot and cold cubes to model adding and subtracting integers and rational numbers.

We are learning about the system of taxonomy and how we organize species by observable characteristics. We modeled this process in class by challenging partners to create a tool that someone else could use to identify specific nails and screws from a bag of hardware. Later in the week, students will be introduced to a project in which they will choose from a variety of project tasks focused on the skill of identification and classification of living organisms. Throughout the next couple of weeks, we will go outside several times to allow students the opportunity to collect leaves, identify plants and observe other living organisms around the Harwood campus. Students are also encouraged to collect leaves or plants (if applicable to their project) from anywhere in our local community. This project will span about 2-3 weeks, to allow students ample time to complete the project. We will also being doing other activities in the classroom around classification. The project is due on Wednesday, October 16, 2019.

We wrapped up our house-building activity with interesting results. Many student were surprised that in some cases houses that were built on a limited budget of $100 were able survive more weather tests than more expensive houses. In this choice simulation, students found out that making the right choices was the key indicator of success.

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Here is a marshmallow. You can eat it if you want. However, you can wait, and if after a certain period of time, you haven’t eaten any of the marshmallow, you will get another marshmallow. At the beginning of this unit students will be given this test as a way to introduce the concept of self-control, a major theme of our new unit: “Invest in Yourself”. During this short unit, students will complete a Myers-Briggs personality inventory, research some possible careers, and explore some higher education options. The guiding question: What are the things you can do in your life now to help ensure success for your future self?

This week in English students will focus on becoming increasingly perceptive and reflective as they read and watch stories.

We have been introduced to the Signposts earlier in the year and now apply them to several short films including: "Colosse" in which a little bird helps his friend find freedom and "Bao" one of my favorite films of all time. We will also read "Duck Hunting", an excellent autobiographical short story by Gary Paulsen.

Our first scored prompt will be due Wednesday. Look for more info on upcoming reading and writing assignments next week!

We will start our Accentuate the Negative unit this week with a fun game of trivia. The classes split into five teams and are asked a variety of different trivia questions worth different point values. The trivia questions are math, random trivia and fun facts about their core teachers. This always offers some interest and humor to the game. Each student is responsible for tracking each teams scores by combining positive and negative numbers based on correct and incorrect answers. Students will write number sentences and sketch number lines, both vertical and horizontal, to compare temperatures. Further into the week students will encounter changing temperatures and determine the resulting temperature. Students are expected to solve these problems with informal arithmetic reasoning to connect direction and distance to the number line, and then represent their reasoning with number sentences.

Who, or what, burned down Cheryl's She-Shed? It was Victor! It was lightning! Or was it faulty electronics, or even completely falsified due to video editing technology? We are beginning this week by watching this popular State Farm commercial, and students are practicing the skill of making claims supported by evidence. Students will transfer this skill to construct an explanation about why they do, or do not, think there was evidence of living organisms in our soil sample lab. The explanations are due this Friday.

The Class of 2025 has already shown themselves to be a respectful, capable, and lively bunch, and I am excited to begin working with them! To introduce themselves, each student began by creating their own album covers (after a quick explanation on what a vinyl record is). Based on the colors and symbols that are used, the album cover communicates a variety of information, including birthday, sibling status, hobbies, interests, and traits. I encourage you to check these out during Open House in a few weeks.

In this first week, students started quick-writing, checked out the HU library, picked out independent reading books, and experienced SDR.

Next week, I'm excited to share more about our first activities related to independent reading.

And we're off! The start of the 2019-2020 school year is underway! We have been spending time getting acquainted with each other and our new spaces. The picture above captures one of the many challenges presented during math class. This exercise, called "Get Up On That Chair", encouraged teamwork which is a skill we will sharpen throughout the year. The students willingly accepted the challenge and I look forward to working with them.

We accomplished a lot of great team work this week! After watching a short video clip about divergent thinking, students tried to think of how many different ways they could use a paperclip. After brainstorming on their own, they collaborated with their table mates to build on ideas. Then, students were given 20 minutes to come up with as many ideas as possible for how to use a paperclip. The idea was to challenge everyone to think "outside the box." There are some pretty clever ideas! Next, we are starting to uncover the skills that scientists use and make connections to the work we will do in science class this year. We are uncovering the steps of the scientific method by practicing these skills through mini lab stations.