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- 7th graders hustled hard to get their Gather essays done this week – this was our strongest showing of analysis and essay writing skill. I’m so proud of their critical thinking. Should your 7th grader need it, I did give a due date extension to Monday 11/10 if they need to work over the weekend (we’ve had lots of delays from other projects, Halloween, the long weekend, and our CofC field trip, so I wanted to give them extra time). We will also have a postponed, open note grammar test on Monday 11/10.
Next week, 7th graders will begin their novel study of Anne Frank, keeping their own reflective diaries in the process of unpacking Anne’s life and the history she represents. We will also begin vocabulary unit 4.
Science- This week 7th graders wrapped up their study of the solar system and took their unit test. Students combined everything they have learned so far to make predictions about if life could survive on exoplanets, create diagrams explaining the seasons, and compare craters on moons. Next week we will jump into exploring populations and ecosystems. We will start with learning about ecosystems and all the factors that work together to help life thrive.
Social Studies- We had a wonderful time on our field trip to Charles Towne Landing, not only learning about the original colony, but touring the Native American museum area inside the building. It was a great way to tie in different areas we have studied so far this year and they enjoyed the time and seeing how the colony was set up. We will be moving into English colonization next as we wrap up Spain and its significant role in new world colonization.
Math- This week, the 7th graders put finishing touches on and polished their 3-D models, put together their display for their presentation, and worked on practicing their public speaking skills in preparation for their presentation on Thursday – which was a HUGE success! I’m so proud of their hard work, and I’m so happy you were able to come celebrate their hard work with them!
Next week, we’ll dive back into our math curriculum with unit 3 – which covers solving multi-step equations, inequalities, and systems. We’ll start off with understanding what variables are, analyzing proportional relationships we can represent with equations, and deriving equations from graphs. We’ll also explore one-step equations and combining like terms.
