Hello, Cooper Family! September has arrived and here at TCS Middle School and we are looking forward to what it will hold for your kids. Here are five fun facts about September:

1. The name “September” comes from an old Roman word, “septem,” which actually means 7. That’s right – September was the seventh month of the year on the Roman calendar. It did not become the ninth month until the advent of the Gregorian calendar.
2. Out of all 12 months of the year, September is spelled with the most letters. It contains nine letters, and it happens to be the ninth month of the year. No other months have the same amount of letters as their number in the calendar year.
3. This September “Harvest Moon” is the fullest moon of the year.
When you gaze at it, it looks very large and gives a lot of light throughout the entire night. No other lunar spectacle is as awesome as the Harvest Moon.
4. There are more pop and classic songs with “September” in the title than any other month.
5. The birthstone for September is the sapphire which is said to reduce inflammation, treat fever and act as a lucky charm for the person wearing it. It symbolizes intuition, clarity of thought, peacefulness, as well as loyalty and trust (12 Fun Facts About September! /The Storage Inn Blog, 2020).

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! We started the week by testing our mapping skills then began diving into both early European empires and Eastern Asian! We even created our own empires at the end of the week!

Next week, we will begin diving deeper into the content by looking at the rest of the world in the 1700s. We will end the week by completing Unit 1 – The World in the 1700s. This will bring us to our assessment that is to follow.


What’s happening in ELA?
Your Eighth Graders have been working on making strategic reading plans and ways to access the texts they want to read. We have learned that the New York Public Library website has a useful link titled, “Title Quest: In Search of the Forgotten Title”. As parents, you may even find the website useful. We also reviewed expectations for their reading log journals. Please be sure to look over their journals.

Finally, Eighth Graders are working on a book project. They are creating a one page mini-poster summary for the books they are reading or have recently completed reading. If they are unable to complete the project by Friday morning in class, the project will be sent home to be completed over the weekend.

What’s happening in Science?
Eighth Graders finished up their Rube Goldberg cartoons this week and will start to brainstorm their live-action machines in the next few weeks. Until then, they experimented with dropping balls this week to investigate and calculate acceleration of gravity. They contemplated how air resistance impacts acceleration, as well as the relationship between mass and weight. Next week, they will compare and contrast mass and weight on different planets by exploring Newton’s Second Law.


What’s happening in Math?
The 8th Graders took a brief assessment last week on Distribution, Statistics, and different ways to represent Data. They all crushed it! And to reward them for their hard work we’ve moved onto harder things, like standard deviation and studying the effect of extreme data points on mean and median. But we took a break between that and learned the basics of how to program spreadsheets on our chromebooks, which is an awesome combination of easy, fun, and very useful. They all want to be Marketing Directors now – sorry if I messed up some college plans, but that’s the power of the spreadsheet. In addition to learning to interpret standard deviation, the next week or so will involve more comparing and analyzing data. Very soon we’ll wrap it all up with the End-of-Unit Assessment.

Important Dates:

September 21st: Middle School Curriculum Night (5:30-6:30)
September 29th: Parent Coffee (8:00am-8:45am)