Who doesn’t love to laugh? It feels so good to have a real, tummy aching laugh that makes you cry because it’s so funny. I am writing this while my kids are creating an i-movie about feeding our dog treats, but then speeding it up to sound like chipmunks, and their chuckles are so contagious that I am laughing while I am writing.

So, TCS middle is no exception…we love to laugh at school to make the most of our time together! Intellectual jokes seem to come around a few times a day, silly ones are more common, and of course, something ironic or unexpected occurs daily that always leads to a laugh. We laugh during presentations to help ease anxiety, on the playground while playing games, and during lunch while talking about things we did the night before.

The science of laughter is intriguing. If you are interested, according to a study found in Medical News Today, laughter is found to trigger the release of the “feel good hormones,” otherwise known as endorphins. Endorphins help to relieve pain and trigger feelings of pleasure. The hormone release induced by social laughter can actually form, reinforce, and maintain social bonds.
Thanks for sharing your kids with us! We wouldn’t want to have our endorphins released laughing anywhere else 😀

Cheers to week three!
-LD

Here’s a look at what is happening in each of the classes:

What’s happening in Social Studies?
This week was such a fun week in 8th Grade Social Studies! During the beginning of the week, students received their list of vocabulary words for Unit 1 and then were assigned five of those words for their group to teach the rest of the class! The activities that these students made were so impressive and unique! Students have even asked to do this for each of the units’ vocabulary. We might have some future teachers in this class!

Next week, the students will be diving into the different European states and empires in the 1700s. We will be completing multiple activities from scavenger hunts to mapping activities. The students should be excited as we finally get to start diving into the content!


What’s happening in ELA?
This week in grammar, Eighth Graders have been working on identifying various parts of speech along with prepositional phrases. The students have also worked on the following: subjects, clauses, sentence openers, pronoun agreement, and subject-verb pairs. They’ve also reviewed capitalization and using the correct punctuation. Wow, it is a lot to take in! They will be able to practice grammar skills every week in their notebooks. Your students are becoming quite proficient at using proofreader’s marks. Grammar assessments are given every Friday.

We also discussed reading log expectations this week. Please review with your child the Reading Log Rubric that can be found in their reading notebook. Finally, all reading notebooks with log activities are collected on Fridays and returned on Mondays (this upcoming week, logs will be returned on Tuesday because of the Labor Day holiday). Students should have four reading log journal entries completed for their Monday-Thursday readings. The only exception to this would be if Monday is a holiday.


What’s happening in Science?
Fact, hypothesis, theory or law? Eighth Graders contemplated and differentiated between beliefs and facts, as well as the difference between theory, law, and predictions. They put their newly formed understanding to the test as they experimented with velocity, acceleration, and speed this week. Walking in circles, literally, they were able to see how distance affects both constant speed and acceleration. They also started thinking about Rube Goldberg’s designs by creating and drawing chain reaction cartoons. Some ending products included stapling paper, watering plants, and serving a glass of water.


What’s happening in Math?
Statistics. What do we make of statistics? Are they even real numbers? In algebra we’ve spent the last week exploring data and the different ways we can display it. Different methods of displaying data allow you to interpret it differently because they highlight different aspects, while often eliminating other aspects. We’ve discovered that doing the math involved in Statistics is pretty easy – the hard part is figuring out what it’s telling you once you’ve got it plotted. Next week we’ll start entering data into spreadsheets on our chromebooks, and seeing how quickly we can make changes to entire piles of data.
Oh, did I mention we’re having our first assessment at the end of this week? Everyone’s so excited! ….maybe that’s not the right word…

Important Dates:

September 5th: Labor Day- NO SCHOOL
September 21st: Middle School Curriculum Night (5:30-6:30)