Seabury Middle School Student Mission Statement 2020-2021

 This is the mission statement that our amazing middle schoolers wrote for this school year:

During the 2020-2021 school year, Seabury Middle School students will develop, recognize, and pursue our goals. We will ask thoughtful questions, indulge in our passions, use our strengths, develop our talents, work toward having grit to overcome difficulties, and explore our own identities. As students, we will try to think creatively and attempt to be open-minded and flexible. We will love learning and share that love while also seeking joy even when studying subjects or topics that aren’t our favorites. We will strive to be members of a kind, helpful, and supportive community.

We will do all of this in order to take pride in ourselves, expand our intelligence, be better equipped to face obstacles or difficulties, improve as people, work toward being our best selves, and make progress toward being outstanding members of a global community.

During these unprecedented times, our goal is to learn no matter where we are, whether in school or at home.

Community is a Feeling

During middle school (in any year) creating a community of learners is one of our top priorities, and we spend the first weeks teaching students the tools they need to do school and building that community.

During distance learning, that has taken new forms. This post shares some of our activities and some of our process as we come together to learn and grow and challenge one another.

Seabury Middle School Student 2020-2021 Mission Statement

We worked in groups to draft Seabury Middle School Student Mission Statements for this school year. They will finalize their mission statement next week, and we will share the results with you.

This deliberate and careful task asked the student to collaborate, identify their collective aims, and determine which words best depicted their values and goals for the year. Mrs. Wollum, head of school, helped students see the import of careful language selection, serving as an expert for this assignment.

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Virtual class photo (totally optional, so not all are pictured):

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Core Values Memes

We also asked students to work in small teams to create memes that depicted the middle school's core values. Here are some of their memes and definitions (more to come in a future post!):

Empathy: Empathy is about other people and how they are feeling. It is about thinking about and understanding other people’s feelings.

Agency: Agency is the capacity of an individual to make their own choices.

Grit: "Run and Duck": Grit means that you just keep going no matter what happens, that you are resilient.

Love of Learning

Community

Creativity

Just smile!

It makes everything a bit better.

Welcome Seabury Middle School Families!

2020-2021 - Overarching Theme: The Future We Want

 

The first two weeks of school, we bond, we set goals, we solve problems, and then we ease into an academic schedule. Here is the working schedule (subject to change as needed for the students and the curriculum--we will notify you of any changes in the Friday email.):

Book Recommendations for Summer Reading: Finding 'Good Fit' Books for Gifted Teens

Each reader is different, and not every reader is ready for the content they are able to read. That is the challenge of finding "good fit" books for advanced readers. These lists are just here to help you (and them) find some new books to read.

At each level, these are not all designed to be “challenge” books. Some are just strong middle-grade/YA fiction that students might enjoy reading or that a particular student may not have read yet. Students are—of course--welcome to seek a challenge on one of the older lists as well or to read a great book they’ve missed from an earlier recommended grade. Parents should advise re: content.

Also, the CCBC, an amazing children’s library resource out of the University of Wisconsin, has a
Web site full of lists. You can access their many recommendations here: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/detailLists.asp?idBookListCat=4

I have made three lists:
Books for rising 6th and 7th graders,
Books for rising 7th and 8th graders
Books for rising 8th and 9th graders.

Within the second two lists, I made subcategories with classics on top. Please excuse any duplicates.

Happy Reading!

P.S. I am going to add a few after reports are turned in. I have a "from this year" list that I don't want to forget to include.

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Rising 6th and 7th Graders
• The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
• Rain, Reign by Ann M. Martin
• Wonder by R.J. Palacio
• Half a Chance by Cynthia Lord
• Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff
• Words with Wings by Nikki Grimes
• Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick
• Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo
• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
• Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson
• The White House is Burning by Jane Sutcliffe
• Paperboy by Vince Vawter
• The Call of the Wild
• Al Capone Does My ShirtsI by Gennifer Choldenko
• Better Nate Than Ever by Tim Federle
• Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage
• Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit
• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
• Refugee by Alan Gratz
• The Miracle Worker
• Anything by L’Engle
• Little Women
• The Once and Future King
• Surviving the Applewhites
• Watership Down
• Inherit the Wind
• Navigating Early
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Red Scarf Girl (a nonfiction memoir that reads like a story)
• The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
• The Alchemist
• Echo
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• The House on Mango Street
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• The Princess Bride
• A Wizard of Earthsea

Rising 7th and 8th Graders

Classics:
• Gulliver’s Travels
• The Iliad
• The Odyssey (I prefer the Fagles translation)
• Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
• Austen’s Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and/or Sense and Sensibility
• Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop
• Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels
• The Joy Luck Club
• Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (The first mystery novel)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• P.G. Wodehouse (The Jeeves Stories)
• Agatha Christie’s mystery novels
• The James Bond novels
• John Le Carre’s spy novels

Newer Texts:
• The Flavia de Luce series of mystery novels (set in England, involve chemistry)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
• Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes  (and other Chris Crutcher novels—he’s from Spokane)
• The Fault in Our Stars
• Papertowns
• The Book Thief
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
• Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist (and everything else these co-authors wrote)
• Every Day by David Levithan
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
• The Highest Tide
• Life of Pi
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• The Martian Chronicles
• Ship Breaker
• Sophie’s World
• Bel Canto
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Box Out
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• The Rock and the River
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
- My Name is Not Easy

-Hearts Unbroken

-The Beast of Cretacea

-Clap when You Land

-Almost American Girl

Nonfiction (Check the nonfiction list at the end of the rising 8/rising 9 list, too.)
• Port Chicago
• I Am Malala
• Samurai Rising
• Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

Rising 8th and 9th Graders (Some of the content contained in these novels is a little edgier, so consider discussing options with parents. These are just great books, not necessarily great books for every student.)

Classics:
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth
                        The Age of Innocence
Henry James: Daisy Miller and various short stories
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead 
James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans (Or the whole set of the Leatherstocking Tales)
Richard Wright: Native Son
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle
James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain
Frank Norris: The Octopus
Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Alice Walker: The Color Purple
Willa Cather: My Antonia
Bernard Malamud: The Natural
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Dorothy Dunnet’s The Lymond Chronicles (a series)
Herodotus’ Histories (460 B.C.)
The Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides (431 B.C.)
Don Quixote (1605)
Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
Les Miserables
Crime and Punishment
An American Tragedy
The Time Machine
Anything by Wilde, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dubliners by James Joyce
Siddhartha
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Lord of the Rings
One Hundred Years of Solitude


Newer Works:
The Wide Sargasso Sea
The Hate U Give
On the Come Up
Elena Ferrante’s Novels
Exit West
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Eva Luna
Speak
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Monkey Wrench Gang
The Magicians
Interpreter of Maladies (short stories)
A Separate Peace
The Night Circus
How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents
In the time of the Butterflies

Long Way Down
Ghost

Americanah

House of the Spirits

Purple Hibiscus
The Overstory

White Teeth

Nonfiction
The Physics of the Future
Plato at the Googleplex
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?
The End of Money
Freakonomics
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Mountains Beyond Mountains
The Color of Water
Kaffir Boy
Stamped

Success Is the Tip of the Iceberg

This sketchnote from Sylvia Duckworth illustrates a lesson that a lot of gifted middle school students are in the process of learning. For some, it is THE most important lesson they will learn in middle school. 

Some thoughts about success:

• At times, students who are new to Seabury Middle School express shock or surprise when they are not initially successful. 
• Success is not always easy.
• It can be easy at times. It can also take a lot of work. One type of success is not "worth" more than the other type.
• The end goal might look different to different people at different times.
• Being in a moment of failure, does not mean that a learner is at the end of their journey. It means they're on the path of learning. 
• Students learn through a process of action, reflection and feedback, and then re-attempting that action. Their writing, thinking, reading, and discussion skills all improve in this way.

Students who struggles a lot the first time they complete a particular type of assignment, like writing a thesis statement or doing a close reading chart, might find that the next time they try that same skill, it is easier. The feelings of disappointment and the appearance of failure at that one moment of time, coupled with dedication and hard work, pave the way for later success. As middle school teachers, we know that learning is a journey and that the set-backs and how students react to them are important moments on that journey.

Now, at the end of the school year, when students come to many summative assessments, many of them are also seeing the fruits of their hard work and past struggles. In the past few weeks, I have had many students do something in a way they could not have imagined doing it six months ago. They are impressing themselves. 

They are also starting new journeys, beginning next steps to new goals.

During distance learning, we have been able to see some of those process more closely than in an in-person classroom, and during in-person learning we are able to see some of them more clearly. In both cases, we are prioritizing helping students set goals, know where they are going, and helping them accurately assess where they are on the journey. 

Astronomy is a Great Distance Learning Subject

Seabury has an inquiry based science program. Inquiry is an investigative approach to teaching and learning. Students at Seabury get to explore solutions and develop explanations to phenomena they observe or learn about. This is much the same as what scientists do in the real world. They ask observe a phenomena, ask questions, and investigate. As they obtain new information their ideas and understanding change. Inquiry often begins with a counter intuitive or unexpected event. 

Astronomers investigate the universe using mathematics and electromagnetic radiation such as light, microwaves, and x-rays. Seabury students were presented with three interesting ways light interacts with with objects on earth to create images. One was its reflection on a spoon. The concave bowl of the spoon reflects a different image that the convex back of the spoon. Why? Students were asked to come up with their own question about the phenomena, this lead to ideas about why things appear smaller or larger at different distances. Students also investigated mirrors an infinite loops of reflections. Lastly the students constructed their own refracting telescopes which magnify far away objects. Many connections can be drawn between the way light acts in these situations. 

Seabury is also about hands-on and being there (actually experiencing things). In Astronomy class students have been taking stargazing challenges, trying to locate different constellations and witness events. Some students woke up at the crack of dawn to see an arch of planets or stayed up late to see the sunset. We will be using our new telescopes to focus in on planets and the moon. To document this students are creating their own web-pages using Padlet.   

Astronomy often occurs at night so this distance learning gives us an opportunity to bend our regular schedules and do some nighttime investigations. 

Color shift in infinite reflections

Asking Questions: The First Step toward Learning

Inquiry begins with wonder.

The middle school students are embarking on an exploration of world religions, and the first step that we took on our journey was one geared toward orienting themselves.

Students completed a short survey asking about their religious practices and beliefs as well as their initial thoughts on religion: "I know..." and "I think..."

Once they had shared their bearings, they could then discuss potential paths. Students wrote questions about what they want to know about religion based on what they already know and have experienced. When pasted into a word cloud, their questions look like this:



The next step will be some inspirations: virtual tours of famous religious sites from around the world, religious music, food associated with religious rituals, and religious art.

Students will then have a chance to ask questions again: Now that they know more, what questions are still resonating? What new questions have emerged?

From there, they can branch off and explore.

Giving students time to think about and develop questions before they engage in an inquiry-based learning experience ensures that their questions are of real interest to them.