The HUMS 8th grade celebration will take place on the Spirit of Ethan Allen cruise boat on the evening of Thursday, June 6th.  Students should be dropped off at HUMS at 5pm.  The cruise will last from 6:15-9pm with dinner and dancing included.  Please meet your 8th grader for pick up back at HUMS  at 9:45.  The cost for each student is $50. We understand this may pose a financial challenge for some families. We would like every 8th grader to attend, so if cost is a concern, please contact Liz Hepp (lhepp@huusd.org / 802-583-8163) for scholarship options. Please make checks out to HUMHS.

Save the Date! You are invited to HUMS to help us celebrate some of our learning, including Oratorical speeches and National History Day projects. The event will take place on Thursday, May 9th at 6:00pm. 

For the past few weeks, students have been studying Globalization: the idea that we're all connected through travel, communication, people, products, and culture. One sure sign of globalization is population growth. Students have explored human population growth over time, finding a major increase starting around 1800. To better understand why this happened, we explored scientific advances during the Industrial Revolution.

To conclude this unit, each of us are working to create a globalization news report. Check out the PROJECT DESCRIPTION. You can also see the example report I made HERE. The project is due in the first class after our vacation.

I hope everyone has a great break! 

When we return, the 8th graders will continue to work with squares, square roots, and explore the Pythagorean Theorem. Here is the family resource.

The 7th graders will begin a new geometry unit, investigating angles, triangles, and prisms. Here is the family resource.

As we wrap up the speech writing and revising phase of the Oratorical, students are beginning to turn their attention to public speaking skills and practice. This week we talked about hooks, transitions, engaging the audience, and building planned pauses into the speech so the audience will have time to appreciate the details. Thay have also played public speaking games like Hot Seat and Jokes/Riddles Day to warm-up for the real deal.

NEXT WEEK: our focus will be on "Learning Your Speech without Memorizing". We will also practice enunciation (using marshmallows) in an activity that is always a highlight of the unit. 

AT HOME: all 7th graders should be practicing their speeches at home in short sessions once or twice every day.

First drafts of History Day projects are due today for 8th graders. Students have found out first-hand the challenges of historical research, including synthesizing information, arguing a claim, and citing sources. While we will move on to another unit, we will come back to this project as we make revisions and several students will be preparing for Vermont History Day at UVM on April 6th.

The 7th graders are starting a new unit on expressions and equations. We will work on modeling situations with equations and solving for unknowns. Here is the parent resource with an overview of what's to come.

The 8th graders are starting a new unit on exponents and exponent rules. Here is the parent resource with what we'll be covering in the upcoming weeks.

Every 7th grader has selected a question to investigate and speak about during the Oratorical--happening in a couple of weeks. These topics range from pop culture and sport to science or history, and we are in the paragraph-writing phase this week

AT HOME: you can ask your 7th grader about their topic and some of the interesting things they've learned while researching!

Next Week, we will be revising the speeches for interest, with hooks and transitions, and we'll be playing games to practice public speaking skills as well.