St. Bahkita Pen Pal project continues

Our friend Charlie Roscoe, former Yarmouth resident who runs the non-profit Schools for Refugees, came in to talk with our 5th grade classes last week to kick off to this year's pen pal activities.

HMS students have sent St. Bahkita students over 1800 letters since our pen pal program began. Our students love the experience of sharing information about their daily lives, and learning about the lives of their friends at St. Bahkita.

Our continuing thanks to Paula Vicenzi for bringing this wonderful opportunity to HMS.

Charlie Roscoe

 

Mr. C. on 207

Check out Mr. C's performance on "207" available here . This band has a great sound and a SUPERB drummer!

Floating Think Lab Project-Take Two

Last June we shared a blog post about the Floating Think Lab project available here
Bob Gross shared an exciting follow up to this work:

Over the summer Oliver Peloquin and Emerson Perdales turned one of the boats that we created in Think Lab last year into a sailboat. These boats were funded by the Yarmouth Education Foundation. I attended the official launch event (Emerson was on the bus to a football game, so he missed the exciting event). The boat only leaked a little and moved fairly well when the breeze picked up.

Literary Cafe at HMS

The HMS Library celebrated their tenth Literary Cafe this week! This celebration is held  annually in recognition of Teen Read Week. Our students celebrate the joy of reading while enjoying delicious snacks provided by our wonderful parents. Thanks to Merry Stuhr, Tracy Weinrich, and all of the parent volunteers who make this event possible. Jess Townsend's photos capture this special time at HMS:

7th Grade Science Students Learn about Fungi

The 7th grade science classes welcomed Dan Argo, a local mycologist, on Friday, October 16th. Thanks to Morgan Cuthbert for sharing information about Dan's presentation:

Dan spoke to the classes about his specialty, fungi. The 7th grade science classes are beginning a unit on ecology. Decomposers are often overlooked during ecology studies next to the larger, more common organisms. Dan helped shed light on the importance of decomposers in our ecosystem, and they way they reproduce, which is quite a different process than occurs with other organisms. Also, Dan is a cook and foodie; he shared information and ideas about the delicious possibilities of eating local fungi!
                                                                     

Dan Argo

6th Graders visit Mt. Apatite

Barb Ellis provided this update about the recent 6th grade field trip: 

Mt. Apatite in Auburn hosted approximately 160 sixth graders, teachers and parents on Thursday October 8th. Great fun was had by all as we collected rock samples, identified trees, and enticed catfish. We were pleased to hear students making connections to Alabama Moon, the book we are reading as part of the One Book, One School initiative. 

                                                                          

A Virtual Tour of 8th Grade STEAM

Mr. Dehetre shared this fascinating look at what goes on in 8th grade STEAM:

 

 Any visitor to Mr. Dehetre’s 8th grade STEAM class would be impressed with the variety of learning opportunities being offered. Let’s take a virtual look! 

 

If you were visiting today, you would see several 8th graders working on building a Blinky. What is a Blinky? It’s an electronic kit that students build to learn about basic electronics and soldering. Students are given resistors, capacitors, transistors, light emitting diodes, along with a battery strap and electrical switch. Students solder these parts to a printed circuit board and if done carefully, the Blinky blinks! In the pictures below you will see Michael McNeil carefully soldering a component on to the circuit board. Notice his safety glasses. Safety is very important and observed daily in STEAM. In other pictures you will see David Hattan and Emi Schneider displaying their completed and working Blinkies. Do you know what a capacitor is used for? These students should be able to tell you!

                                                                                 

Michael McNeil

                                   

Emi Schneider

David Hattan

                                                                              
While some students are studying electronics, others are using the computers for computer programming. The students in STEAM are programming in the Python language. Students follow a teacher made tutorial that explains the code as they program a working number guessing game, a “weather” predictor, an Etch-A-Sketch program, and a calculator. These exercises give students just enough knowledge to do more studying independently if they'd like to. In the picture below you will see Jacob Veilleux studying the code he is writing. He has two windows open on his computer. One is the interactive window for checking small chunks of code while the other window is the scripting window used for holding the code for the program he is going to execute. Jacob has told me that he really enjoys coding and talks with his brother about coding games often. 

                                                                                   

Jacob Veilleux

Another opportunity for 8th graders is learning how to illustrate with an application called AutoDesk SketchBook Pro. Students are not expected to be artists though they are encouraged to try out the program and many find that their digital drawing abilities improve more rapidly than expected. In the photo below, Harry Mellor is drawing a hot dog. Prior to this drawing, Harry drew a Minion and a copy of the minion is now displayed on the STEAM bulletin board. 

Harry Mellor

Lastly, students are taught the basics of SketchUp which is a 3D modeling application. Just about anything you can think of can be drawn on SketchUp and reproduced with a 3D printer. In the picture, you will see Abigail Hincks and Liam Sullivan looking at a house floor plan drawn to scale that Abi is working on completing. With SketchUp, students are able to move the model they are drawing so various perspectives of the object can be viewed. 

                                                                                

Abi Hincks and Liam Sullivan

What 8th grade students learn in STEAM is only limited to their imagination. We investigate just about anything that comes along. Learning and discovering is fun and Mr. Dehetre hopes that all his students will always have the desire to learn and discover new things.