8th Grade Updates

Hello 8th Graders! In these final days before school, we have been very busy getting ready for for your arrival. Your planners have your names on them,  your cubbies and hooks await your belonging, and schedules have been printed. You don’t have to bring all your materials on the first day, but please bring paper [...]

is in two days.

Typed, polished, edited GRADUATION SPEECH and MONOLOGUE

The Great Match Hello World Cup. Check it out! image source

You should all have received summer reading information from your high schools. If not, inquire. That said, I’d like to pass along some of the information that I have. (Many thanks to Pam Haley for gathering this information.) St. John’s Prep For CP1, Accelerated students: Read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck plus one of the [...]

This piece, by Dan Woolhiser, graced the back cover of the poetry anthology. On June 9, under the bright lights in the auditorium at Veteran’s Middle School in Marblehead, these four students read the following original poems at Wednesday’s Peace Poetry Festival. They did a really wonderful job. Their poems – and the poems of all [...]

Dear Parents, On Wednesday, June 9th from 1:30 – 2:30, the Marblehead Peace Committee is hosting a Peace Poetry Festival. The event will take place at Veterans Middle School in Marblehead, and I’d like to take the opportunity to invite all parents and friends. In advance of this event, each 8th grader from both [...]

Just a few hours to lift-off. Canada, here we come. (Tomorrow morning, the 8th grade is gathering from between 6:00 and 6:30 am at MCCPS, boarding the bus, getting settled in and heading on its way north…)

Among other activities, the 8th graders spent some time today writing imagined histories of very real things. As inspiration for this creative writing exercise, the students watched a few beautiful, intriguing, and wildly creative videos created by Tiny Circus, which bills itself as “a community based art-project and spectacle.” These brief, stop-motion films explore, as the [...]

Check out this great project and site – Poems for Peace. You can read what kids around the world have written on the subject. This may help in inspiring you as you work on your own poem. (Look at your assignment guidelines here.)

Calling all passports! Bring them to school beginning on Monday, May 17.

Check out this great site – Mass Moments – for some really interesting daily Massachusetts history.

The introductory paragraph and outline for the Mathematician/Scientist project is due on May 10, and the first draft is due on May 24.

The American Civil War, which the 8th graders have been slowly inching towards through their study of the pre-war era, certainly lives on at the very core of who we are as a people and as a nation. Or does it? One could just as easily argue that we pay too little attention to the past, to [...]

And…we’re back. I hope that everyone had a great vacation!

In celebration of national poetry month, Knopf, the publishing house, features a poem-a-day on its website. Today’s poem: The Day Lady Died by Frank O’Hara. I really like O’Hara, and though it’s not an easy read – it’s full of the sorts of references accessible only to, well, literary, urban, elite, snobbish types from mid twentieth [...]

National poetry month is here, so let’s hear it for that most tightly packed, elusive and powerful bundle of words. How about one by 19th century Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson? What’s your favorite poem? A Light Exists in Spring by Emily Dickinson A Light exists in Spring Not present on the Year At any other period – When March is scarcely here A Color [...]

Source On Friday, the 8th grade students are heading out to the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (to see, among other things, the sculpture above.) It’s a great place and should be a really cool trip.