The school year is in full swing. We have started KYA, Future City, Year-long Stock Market Game, MathCounts, and Book Clubs.
- KYA students will select which bills will go to KYA on our Personalized Learning Day. Some of the bill topics include recess for middle and high schoolers, electric garbage trucks, increasing the minimum wage, and increasing sales taxes for the natural disaster relief fund. They will also have a lot of practice debating bills.
- Future City teams have selected locations and teammates. Our cities encompass the globe this year. Cities include Kyiv, Ukraine; Jubail, Saudia Arabia; Toronto, Canada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Raliegh, North Carolina; and Cape Town, South Africa. All the teams are researching what they want their future cities to look like around this year's challenge. Students' challenge is to choose a climate change impact and design one innovative and futuristic climate change adaptation and one mitigation strategy to keep your residents healthy and safe.
- Stock Market Game teams are learning why it is important to invest as well as what stocks are. Starting next month, they will begin trading stocks.
- MathCounts students are starting to practice different types of MathCounts problems.
- See if you can solve this: A newly hatched hornsnickel dragon is 6 inches long. If the hornsnickel is carefully cared for, it will grow 3 1/2 feet per month until it reaches a length of 42 feet. What is the length, in feet, of a hornsnickel dragon five months after it is hatched?
- Book Clubs have chosen their books and started reading them. They will be meeting next week for their first discussion. Books they are reading are Restart by Gordon Korman, Amal UnBound by Aisha Saeed, Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, and The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee.
Check out the resource page. I will add the syllabus/description for each TAG's offerings and different competitions students can enter throughout the year. There will also be general information about East/West Middle School TAG.
Next month be on the lookout for our new TAG reporters' articles. I am interviewing students now to see who will be up to the task of letting you know what is happening in our program.
