It was a pleasure teaching this year’s graduating 8th Grade class. They are all creative, wonderful students who will do great things in high school and beyond. They were very busy at the end of the school year with their End of Year project which resulted in the DVD they all received at the Graduation Breakfast. I hope that each of you has had a chance to watch this beyond the excerpts shown at the breakfast.

Prior to the End of Year Project, all 8th graders spent one day taking a series of timed typing tests and creating Excel spreadsheet to calculate their average typing speed. Many of this year’s 8th grade class loved Mavis Beacon and would spend time working in it every chance they got and this showed in some of the average speeds. For any 8th grader who isn’t already typing at least 40 wpm, I would highly encourage some keyboarding practice before they begin high school.

Each 8th grade student also viewed all of the Think Before You Post presentations and voted for their favorites in 3 different categories. The awards for these were given out at the Graduation Breakfast and congratulations again to the winners!

8th Grade also spent some time correcting errors in three poems about Spell Checkers. Often we all rely too much on the spell check feature in Microsoft Word and these poems point out that this tool will not catch every error you make in something you write. Try these yourself? Can you find all the errors?

For Earth Day, 8th Grade watched the discussed the presentation, The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard. As a follow-up to this presentation, each 8th Grade student created a ribbon piece on the PlanetFesto ribbon to celebrate the reasons they love the earth and to commit to doing something to help perserve the earth. Some of the 8th Grade students created original artwork for their ribbon piece while others used one of the stock photos available for this project.

Last but not least, 8th Grade added to the Social Studies wiki with their Wordles and analyses of Presidential Inaugural Speeches.