Middle School: September 8-12, 2025

Middle School

Sep 9

Hello, Middle School Families,

Thank you to everyone who came to curriculum night! It was wonderful to see all of you, talk about the year ahead, as well as have an opportunity to be together as a class community. Thank you also to the Eighth grade parents for staying to discuss the Eighth grade trip and graduation. While it made for a late night, it was wonderful to be able to speak all together in person.

Last week, the class moved into exploring the Nature of Air. Through several demonstrations and activities, the students put into words everyday experiences they have had with air. The class had several “Wow!” experiences when observing a disparate experience - an object not responding to air in the manner in which was expected. Bernoulli’s Principle was particularly thrilling when demonstrated by blowing between two nearby ping pong balls. The ping pong balls didn’t separate - they moved towards each other! This set the stage for our discussions of the effect of air pressure/atmospheric pressure on weather patterns.

While we are in a Physics block, Language Arts continues to be woven into the curriculum. Together, students wrote a class biography of Blaise Pascal, focusing on varying sentence structure to keep the essay from being “dry”. In addition, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, the class reader, was introduced last week. This book is an excellent pairing to our Physics block, as it ties in a lot of Physics principles students have experienced over the past year into a real-life story. Students also analyzed Wordly Wise analogy questions and together practiced various strategies for completing these types of questions on tests. We took the time to articulate and really examine the relationship between the words given, and discussed how to answer the question, even if you don’t know what all the words mean.

Announcements & Reminders:

Parent/Teacher Conferences are October 9 and 10th. Please sign up here: Middle School