1. Today the grade 8’s wrapped up a study of the Middle Ages with a Medieval Day.  More details to come… but the day included archery, making stained glass, swords and a hearty stew for lunch.

2. Last week, all three classes spent the day at UBC visiting the Beaty Biodiversity Museum and the Museum of Anthropolgy… here are the first reviews from the trip….

“There were platypus’ there (at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum).  The presentation was called What is biodiversity? We learned about some kind on underwater cone snail and how they ate their prey.  It was kind of cool, they reach with their tails into the sand and bring clams up.  They then scrap at the shell until it breaks open and drill a little tiny hole into the shell and then they spit acid into the shell, then they suck up the clam.  We also learned about another snail and it has little barbed harpoons in a sac and whenever something swims by it, it shoots a harpoon into the fish, kills it with poison and then can eat the fish whole,” Jane explained.

“There were so many different specimens, over 600,000.  I could just spend a day there looking at everything.  What stood out was that they could find a old species that no one knew what it was and they first thought it was a shrimp, but then they realized it was the nose of a seahorse type creature.  It was a really fun trip,” said Mark.

3. 3rd Habit Presentation

We have been continuing to work on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens and have been focusing on Putting First Things First.  Students prepared presentations to show what they know about the 3rd Habit.  We will be uploading some of the presentations next week.  Projects were very well done and varied from power points, to videos and skits, to programs on Scratch to poster boards.

4. Free the Children presentation about availability of drinking water happened on Thursday morning and a few MACC students had the opportunity to participate in a workshop for the day.  A hearty and engaged discussion ensued following the presentation, and much discussion was had about charities.

“The workshop did a couple questions to get to know each other.  We did a really good activity that showed us how many people water bourne illnesses, how people don’t get enough water and how many people get more than enough.  Andrew (from Free the Children) gave us a card with information about who we were and where we lived, then he read out different scenarios and we got to move closer or further away from water,” said Marcus.  “Then after lunch, we brainstormed way to bring awareness to water issues.  We spent time planning what we would do with the ideas. The idea I worked on was a cook off.  It wasn’t an awareness activity, but just a fundraiser.”

5. Choir Sing Out at Kway Middle

“It was fun to hear all the other choirs. They even had an elementary choir. One of the choirs sang this parody of Noel, which we all laughed at. Most of the choirs weren’t as big as ours, but they still sang pretty loud. The boys sang The Hockey Song, then Mrs.Gallelo admitted she’s never seen the Polar Express, so the girls sang Hot Chocolate. We all sang North Pole Rock and Roll.” – Evan L

6. Life Links field trip

Several of our grade 8’s are in Life Links this Exploration term.  With Mr. Meagher and Ms. Trieu they ventured up Burnaby Mountain in the snow and spent the morning geocaching.

7. Portfolios

The grade 6/7’s are working on portfolios to show Evidence of Learning for Term 1.  Ms. Abbot and Ms. Moody are trying new ways to share student learning and student portfolios will be coming home with report cards next Friday.  Our hope is that the portfolios will provide a snap shot of students’ reflection on their numeracy and literacy skills, social and emotional learning and creative thinking from the term.  Students receive feedback from us throughout the term using a variety of methods including rubrics, BC Writing Performance Standards, written feedback and comments and will be including some specific examples in their portfolios.

8. TED talks

As a teaser for the New Year, we have started to watch some TED talks.  Students brainstormed what features TED talks include and have started to develop a criteria.  In the New Year, we will be hosting a Yellow Team TEDx type speech festival.  Instead of doing traditional Public Speaking this year, student will be developing their own TED talk on a person worth knowing or an idea worth sharing. More details will be given to students in the New Year.

9. Math winding up before the break

Both Ms. Abbot and Ms. Moody are wrapping up units in Math and will be starting new units in the New Year.  Students are working to complete assigned work and tests before the break.

10. Battle of the Books

The Annual Battle of the Books was announced this week.  It is open to all students in grade 6-8.  Students form teams of 3 and let Ms. Trieu know before December 20th.  If students are interest, but don’t have a team of three they can talk with Ms. Abbot, Ms. Moody or Ms. Trieu and we can help form a team.  Then you read the books on the list…Hint: you can divide up the books so that each person reads 2 or you can all read all 6 books. The idea is to know the books very well so it helps to have an ‘expert’ on each book. Or, all members of the team can read all the books. We will have elimination rounds here at Hillcrest Middle School, where teams will need to answer questions about the books. These will take place after Christmas Holidays. The top teams from Hillcrest Middle will compete against the other schools after Spring Break.

Battle of the Books Reading List

1.Flipped Wendelin Van Draanen

2.A Wrinkle in Time Madeleine L’Engle

3.Home of the Brave Katherine Applegate

4.Shipwreck Gordon Korman

5.The False Prince Jennifer Nielsen

6.The Uglies Scott Westerfeld

Ms. Abbot and Ms. Moody were both off for extended periods throughout the month.  We seemed to tag off and as Ms. Abbot came back, Ms. Moody headed off.  We are both back and catching up with the blog.

1. Yellow Team had the opportunity for 30 students from the team to participate in an Anime workshop and a Clay workshop.  “We learned how to draw manga characters and we made anime buttons.  It was awesome!” said the students.  “We looked at a bunch of abstract clay statues.  There was a 3 creatures that look Egyptian, these were the best.  We went to the studio and made a bowl out of clay, they went through all the steps with us and we painted them with glaze.  They fired them and we will get them back later, ” said Marcus.

2. Remembrance Day this year focused on Paschendale.  “It was fun to sing for the first time with Girls Choir at the Remembrance Day Assembly.  We sang In Flanders Fields and Hymn to Freedom,” said Natalie.  “The assembly was quite good,” said Liam, “we sang Take Me Back to Dear Old Canada and Hymn to Freedom. We practiced a lot and it turned out well.”

3. After learning about our family histories through drawing family trees (when we read Between Heaven and Earth) and interviews with family members (one of the tasks for the literature circle on the Seven Series), we broadened the scope and looked at timelines.  We drew timelines and hightlight key events from various civilizations and cultures. “Once the projects were done, they all had similar information but all of them are done in different ways,” said Natalie.

4. This month, we (grade 6/7/8) also finished the Literature Circle on the Seven Series.  Students wrote two written responses to whichever novel(s) they read and completed a task related to the theme of the novel.  Some students interviewed family members about what it was like from them to be a teenager, created maps of the characters’ journey, wrote an essays on the relevance of cliche in the novel and whether meaning changes over time, designed gang prevention brouchures, designed a symbol that would be significant to family, created a suitcase of memories for a grandparent, compare character from the novel to a quote from The Tell-Tale Heart, build models of World War II planes,studied the geological profile of Iceland and researched the International Bridgades in Spain during World War II.  Some students also selected challenge topics and wrote either an additional chapter to the series about the adventures a hypothetical granddaughter may have had or wrote an epilogue for the series when all the grandsons reunite and share stories.

5.Ms. Abbot introduced us to the concept of circuits.  We did electricity safety activities with Ms. Rogan (in for Ms. Moody) and Ms. Abbot taught us about parallel and series circuits.  We tried many many variations and burned out several mini light bulbs.  We had the opportunity to try a lab.  We got one of five options and then prepped the supplies and tried the lab.  Some worked, some didn’t.  We tried lemon batteries, but couldn’t get enough current to light the LED bulb.  We only had 3 lemons. Mr. Utting let us measure the conductivity of the lemon juice and we compared it to water.  Other groups did static experiments and one group built their own light bulb. Another group tried to build an electroscope.  We presented to the rest of the class and tried to explain our results and we shared our models.

6. We have continued to work on the Seven Habits for Highly Effective Teens.  This term we have focused on stratgies to put “first things first.”  We have talked about how to prioritize what is important to complete first, and how to identify things that may be time wasters that we might use to procrastinate.  Right now, the grade 6/7’s are working on projects to show what we know about the 3rd Habit.

7. Grade 6/7’s Explorations classes are currently Home Ec and Art.  Students have been cooking french toast and sugar cookies, made fruit platters and open face canapes.  We also hand sewed stuffed animals.  In Art, we have been working on clay projects and doing a daily doodle.  Grade 8’s are currently in Life Links, Dramus and Tech Ed.  We are making a medicine cabinet in Tech Ed and we have finished the frame.  This year, we made boats in Sketch-Up.  In Life Links, we learned about how social we are and about how we cope with stress.  We learned everyones names in the class.  In Dramus, we have been learning to play guitar, doing improv and we learned how to do a fight scene.

8. All the grade 8’s in our school have been doing a project called the Feudal Games.  This is a game where you take on the role of a medieval character such as a serf, a free holder or a monarch.  We play our role in daily life, this means writing cheques to the monarch, working and collecting pay and trying to survive through diseases and war.

9. With Mr. Utting in French, we have been working on conjugating verbs. We reviewed and learned to conjugate “er”, “re”, avoir and etre.  Ted explained that “er” verbs are conjugated by (using aimer as an example): Je aime, Tu aimes, Il/Elle aime, Nous aimons, Vous aimez, Ils/Elles aiment.  We were assigned a city in France and we needed look around the city for signs and words (on Google Earth).  We translated the words and then drew something that represents the city we were assigned.  We also wrote a short description of why the city is famous.

10. Mr. Utting x 2!!  So, one chilly day, our class (MACC 8), went out into the park of Mundy, to visit the lake of Mundy – and since we needed to, we brought a couple of Mr. Uttings. Pretty much, all we did was surveying the water in and around Mundy Lake for its conductivity and pH levels with Mr. Utting – the teacher and his brother, Mr. Utting – the scientist of hydrology. I’m pretty sure that most of us were nearly frozen after a few minutes – I stuck my hands into the water after measuring the flow of the waters to get the ping-pong ball out. At the end of our little walk around the lake, we all celebrated in a glorious chocolate rain of one square per person. Many a laugh was had during, and we then headed back to the school after our warm walk in the park. – Liam D