January is turning out to be a busy time in the Middle School, as if it is ever NOT busy.  We are gearing up for our Project Empathy overnight, by collecting blankets for the homeless.  We have partnered with the high school and the 6th grade to gather as many as possible.  On Wednesday, we celebrated Western Day with our annual chili-cook off.  As you can imagine, we really look forward to this lunch.  Not only is the chili great, we squeeze out a lunch period that is a little longer than 24 minutes!   This year we had many fine pots of chili, all the fixins’ and ice cream to top off.  We are so grateful to our moms who always come through with the much appreciated cheese and chips.

The two Mrs. Wilsons are excited about a joint project.  They are meshing their classes, math and science, in a project of building a rocket.  In groups, the students will form companies, “buy” supplies, and build rockets.  They will have to make “commercials”  to sell their rockets.  This is a first attempt at putting math and science together:  bear with us as we match up 85 kids into groups of 3.

In our first meeting, we watched a video on an engineering company in Palo Alto.  The video stressed that it took all kinds of people to accomplish a design challenge, from engineers to psychologists, to business people.  Their creation of a new grocery cart design was fascinating.  We didn’t design a cart, but the kids built a tower with 5 pieces of paper and a foot of tape.   Check out the picture of a successful paper structure!  Hopefully, they will spend their million dollar budget wisely and get some great rockets in the air.  STAY TUNED!!