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Cortland Junior High Newsletter

May 2023

Cortland JuniorHigh NewsletterMay 2023

Junior High Orchestra News

Several Junior High Orchestra students are planning on going to Barry School to perform for the younger students during their SEL assembly later this month.


The Junior High Orchestra is working towards their concert on Thursday, June 8th at 6:30 PM. They are looking forward to performing for you!


String Lab students have been working hard throughout this year! We are almost finished with our Book 1.

Junior High Concert Band

The Junior High Concert Band will be taking a trip on May 25th to Barry School to play for the second graders, then go to Cort Lanes to complete their bowl-a-thon fundraiser, and have lunch at McDonalds.

Students will need to bring $7.50 for bowling in order to participate in the bowling portion of this day.

Students are also being invited to play their instruments at the May 9th JH BOE meeting.

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Student Senate

Student Senate is preparing for our next Junior High dance on June 9th. It will be a neon theme and a great way to celebrate the end of the year being near! Please also be on the lookout for letters coming home with information on the Hershey Park trip June 20th. The second deposit is due May 10th, and the final deposit will be due in June.

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ELA

In ELA we are beginning our unit about Shakespeare! We will be reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and analyzing the complicated yet beautiful language of one of the greatest writers of all time. We are also celebrating National Poetry Month (April) and have read a different poem at the beginning of every class period. Students also created their own Found Poems, in which they deconstructed passages/sentences/words from books in order to create a poem about a topic of their choice. Ask to see them!

Team 1 ELA

Team 1 ELA is just starting our final novel of the year, Freak the Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick. We will be focusing on themes that center around friendship, acceptance of others, and the power of storytelling. Towards the end of the unit, students will be creating their own original board game to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of the novel!

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Home and Career Skills

In Home and Career Skills, students are learning about friendships and conflict. We will continue Unit 3 by discussing peer pressure, refusal strategies, addiction, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and drugs. A NYS mandated lesson will be taught about HIV and AIDS, and Officer Reyngoudt will visit all classes to teach about sexting. We will finish off the unit learning about family. Our next unit will be Food and Nutrition.

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Math 7

Math 7 has applied real world situations to our Percent Unit. (sales, tax, loans..)

We will next begin a unit on Probability.


Final Exams in June.


Math 7A finished applying Pythagorean Theorem to solve word problems. Our next 2 units are Transformations and then Exponents. Final Exams in June.

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7th Grade Art

7th grade art students are beginning a free choice project with the theme of abstraction. We have looked at a variety of artists such as Georgia O’Keefe, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Kline for inspiration. This will be an exciting unit with many unique creations.

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Tech 8

Tech 8 completed their Egg Crash Cars and tested them in our own collision test competition!

We are moving onward to our unit in aerodynamics as we use new tooling and design drafting skills developed throughout the year to create CO2 Drag Cars. These will be raced in a drag-style competition! Any car that can outpace Mr. Blasko’s will earn a special reward!


Mr. Blasko is currently working to build a downdraft sanding table with funding gained from a grant-in-aid awarded by the local chapter of DKG. This will improve the air quality and cleanliness of the shop when students are smoothing their projects. Pictures to come once it’s completed!

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8th Grade Math

In 8th grade math, students are finishing up our volume mini-unit and will be starting the pythagorean theorem and then statistics which is our last unit before our final exam in June.

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Library and Makerspace

Books and Boats! Here at the library we’ve got students checking out books for English class, independent reading, book clubs and research projects! Don’t forget to return all your library materials when you’re done with them. The end of the school year is fast approaching! We also have boats being made out of large cardboard boxes! They will see how well and how long they can float in them on May 6th at SUNY Cortland’s pool.

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Social Studies

In Social Studies, we are going to be learning about the Roaring Twenties and The Great Depression. For the Roaring Twenties, students will create a biography on a figure from the Harlem Renaissance/Roaring Twenties.

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