The Middle School track team competed in a meet against a variety of local charter schools on Tuesday. Eighth grader Jocelyn Gill took first place in shotput by six feet and the long jump by nearly three feet! She also won the high jump, with Sienna Douglas taking second place. The girls 4x100M relay team, including eighth graders Joi Young, Ava Williams, Avis Weedan, and Zara Ferguson, took fourth overall out of nearly 30 groups. Sixth grader Lia Simone Valentine took seventh overall in the 400M race, and seventh grader Ben Hitt finished sixth overall in the 1600M for the boys, while eighth grader Madelyn Zeller finished tenth for the girls. In the 200M, sixth grader Cat McPherson finished first for the Latin girls and eighth grader Deandre Foxx finished first for the Latin boys. The boys’ 4x800M relay team, consisting of eight graders Ben Hitt and Zeke Schmidgall, sixth grader Liam Pittard, and seventh grader Charlie Batkin, finished second, losing the race by just 0.01 seconds. Charlie raced against a top runner for DCI and kept pace with him the whole way. A great day at the races!
Fifth graders at the 2nd Street Campus launched model rockets in the field this week in Ms. Dorsey’s science class. Sam Alvord, father of fifth grader Caleb Alvord, helped the students create Estes model rockets with metal with plastic fins and a parachute inside. The experiment used solid rocket fuel made with black powder propellant to create a reaction like dynamite. Students put metal starters into the end of the propellant. The starters were connected with alligator clips to a wired launch stick. The launch stick sends an electrical current to the starter which heats up and ignites the propellant. Students created charts of the blast off, showing Newton’s Three Laws of Motion and describing the types of forces and energy the rocket used and produced.
In Mr. Lawrence Liu’s Upper School Government class, students are discussing the purpose of government and evaluating whether the most important role is keeping order or protecting individual rights. Students are reading excerpts from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and summaries of John Locke’s view of government. The discussion will help students work on asking questions, citing texts, and evaluating each other’s thoughts. This type of discussion helps build substantive knowledge of history and philosophy and the practical skills necessary to evaluate and think critically. Mr. Liu, who worked as a lawyer both in private practice and in a federal agency, uses his legal expertise and experience in the classroom to help deepen students’ understanding.
Students in various English classes are reflecting on summer reading through writing and projects. In Ms. Peale’s seventh grade class, students are writing essays about their summer choice books. In eighth grade, students are writing narrative poems to demonstrate the experience of the different narrators in the book Refugee. Students in Ms. Alston’s ninth grade class are making a timeline of the events in their summer reading book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, putting the story, which is in reverse chronological order, into the correct order and choosing the most significant events. Students in AP Language will be presenting to the class using emblematic images from history, art, or popular culture to help express ideas about the graphic novel of Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” talking about the relationship between words and image.
Last Friday Ms. Melissa Vercammen’s choir class took their music outdoors for a kinesthetic test of their music knowledge. Students lined up along the lines on the blacktop by the lunch tables and had to move their bodies in line with different slabs of pavement to name that note. Students cheered each other on as players were eliminated, testing to see their knowledge of notes using physical space to represent the different letters. Ms. Vercammen, who has been a member of our faculty for more than a decade, is the chair of the arts department and teaches choir, music and Jazz band for students in 8th through 12th grade.
