With the switch to offsite learning due to the coronavirus outbreak, our faculty will be sharing various curriculum highlights from their virtual classrooms.
Second Graders Take Their Class Outside
The second graders went on a nature walk this week close to their homes. Using their senses, they were asked to make scientific observations of the natural world. To take their learning about nature in another direction, students then looked at their observations with the eyes of a poet. These observations served as the inspiration for their writing of Haiku poems.
– Nancy Fell, grade 2 teacher
Seventh Grade Latin Students Create Mosaics
Students in seventh grade Latin are wrapping up their final unit of the year. In addition to diving into the use of the pluperfect tense, memorizing vocabulary, and working with noun-adjective pairs, student interest was piqued when studying the mosaics found in Romano-British villas in the first century CE. Distance learning provided students with a unique opportunity to travel virtually to Fishbourne Roman Palace and walk the grounds, viewing hypocausts, reception chambers, and the gardens. Students then got the opportunity to recreate their own Roman-inspired mosaics digitally.
– Nicole Buck, middle school Latin teacher
Arts: Sixth Graders Dive Into Improv & Voice Acting
The sixth grade theater arts class recently focused on some improvisational work. Students warmed up by participating in a one-word story exercise in which each student added one word during several rounds to create a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end. Next, students learned what it’s like to post edit their voice by timed lip-syncing, just like in the movies. Students were given several famous phrases from past movies with two tones preceding the phrase recording. Their job was to match their voices and personality, as well as their facial expression and attitude to the tenor of the phrase.
– Christopher Parsons, theater arts teacher
Eighth Grade Science Erupts With Learning
Students in eighth grade science, gold group, have been learning all about chemical reactions. To dive deeper into this topic, we completed a lab in which students were given a variety of chemical reactions and selected one of these reactions to perform at home. Students caused eruptions, created “invisible ink”, made lava lamps, explored different substances to retard fruit browning, dissolved eggshells, and made bubbles, to name a few. Students had a blast performing their reactions and uploading videos of themselves explaining what they observed.
– Leal Carter, Grades 7 & 8 science teacher
