BETHEL—This week’s TMS report features what’s happening in the 7th grade core classes.

ELA ​with Mrs. Lilly:​ What if you could live forever? Please note for your calendar the following: January 22, 2020 a community book club will be held at the Learning Commons at 6:30 p.m. Please consider reading ​Tuck Everlasting ​by Natale Babbitt and joining this group. All community members are welcome to attend. There are a few copies of the book left if anyone would like to borrow one. Just stop into the Telstar Middle School office.

Is your life wonderful? After reading and studying dramas, the seventh grade class had a wonderful experience at the Portland Stage Company in December. They watched and participated in a radio show performance of ​It’s a Wonderful Life.​ The students were able to meet with the actors after the show and were taught about the performance and the elements that make the drama magical. In conjunction with this thematic study, the students were able to Facetime with a director of a theater based out of Chicago. She did an answer and question session with the students and explained the nuances of creating a production.

Math with Mrs. Walde: ​Whoever said math wasn’t fun? To wrap up 2019, the seventh graders participated in a Math Escape Adventure. Maybe you’ve heard about or been in an Escape Room,which is great fun for the whole family as you try to solve your way out of a locked room. At TMS, we DID NOT use a locked room, but instead had students unlocking boxes to find clues for finding the ultimate treasure. And, of course, because this was math class, finding the clues to the codes and keys required solving math problems. Students worked as a class and I was really impressed with how engaged everyone was. They had a great time doing math, and have asked for more! I’ll use this activity again to review and practice more skills later in the year.

Science with Mrs. Proulx:​ In seventh grade science students are now discussing the processes of photosynthesis and cellular respiration. They have been making models of both processes and exploring the phenomena questions “What food do plants eat for energy?” and “How does the food we eat give us energy?”. Using the models the students are able to see what is a part of these processes and how they are related. They are also using evidence and reasoning to support their claims about them. We continue to prepare for the science fair by starting to write a research paper about topics and reading scientific articles. Soon students will be testing their question or our creating an invention for the science fair on March 19th!

Social Studies with Mr. Cobb: In Social Studies, the seventh graders recently completed a unit about how the Native Americans came to Maine and how they lived through the thousands of years after the last glacier until the European explorers came here. Though the focus of this unit was entirely about Native Mainer’s, our future units will integrate history from the perspective of the Native peoples into our studies as well. The students just completed a project about the early colonies on the coast of Maine, based on the 1607 Popham Colony. The students wrote a proposal requesting funding for their own colony which required a written section and a drawing of the colony. This multi-step project meets many standards required in seventh grade Social Studies including Native American history, economics, geography, reading, global connections, and history. As we move forward, the students will discover how the multiple conflicts between settlers and the native populations shaped the District of Maine up to the Revolutionary War.