This time of year at The Cooper School is pure magic! The rooms are buzzing as elementary and middle school students put the finishing touches on projects that show off all the incredible learning they’ve been doing.
I love watching ideas take shape—groups working together, sketching, building, testing, and sometimes realizing they need to pivot and start again (even when it means more work!). Those moments are where the real learning happens.
Everyone jumps in to help—teachers supporting teachers, students lending a hand to classmates who need it. It’s teamwork and community at its best.
As a parent, I often find myself so happy that I get to be a fly on the wall – lucky to witness it all. Trust me—it’s even better than you can imagine!
-Rives
ELA- 8th graders finished their photography and writing unit strong this week as we displayed masterpieces for family and friends on Friday. So proud of their artistry. We will make up our grammar test on Monday 11/10 (which will be open note) in order to account for class missed due to the long weekend, Halloween, and the CofC fieldtrip.
Next week, students will begin the much anticipated To Kill a Mockingbird novel study and our vocabulary unit 4.
Science- This week 8th grade finished up their gravity and kinetic energy unit with their Rube Goldberg machines. They were amazing engineers who came up with some really cool concepts to show how energy transfers between objects. Next week we will start exploring waves, starting with defining what a wave is by collecting data about their pulse and experimenting with spring waves.
Social Studies- They have been working hard on their Latin American revolutions projects in which they had to choose a revolution on the 1800’s. They are making posters and collages about their country. This will let them discover how similar all of these events were even though they were in different countries. Going forward we are preparing for the quiz on Latin America before we move into the next aspect in OER, which is the industrial revolution.
Math-This week in math, 8th graders spent class on Wednesday reviewing and practicing proofs about triangle dilations and similarity before taking our test on Thursday! The test assessed their readiness for our next unit over right triangle trigonometry – sin, cosin, tangent, oh my! Next week, we’ll dive into unit 4 – starting with right triangle trigonometric ratios and understanding how we can find different missing parts of a right triangle using them.
