April 2011

On April 7th, the girls choir, or Knightingales, is singing their way to choir festival! The festival is a program where different schools choir groups get to sing for judges who tell the choir what they need to work on and what was done well. It gives choirs a chance to show their talent and be able to know what they can do to make the group sound better. This event is being held here at Springville Junior High.

SJHS is leaping, sprinting and throwing with track. Track season has begun, and the students at SJHS are very excited and looking forward to it.  Peggy Sorenson, eighth-grade distance runner, said, “I’m most looking forward to track because this year we are going to beat Mapleton!”

Track is a school sport for anyone and everyone who wants to join. The track team practices every day after school until 4:30. On Wednesdays, students get to practice at Springville High School;  Anna Bunnell, eighth grader, said, “ I like practicing at the real track because it gives us a feel of what we’ll be racing on when we actually compete at meets.”

In math students talk a lot about pi, but on March 14th they talk about pie (as well as eat it)!  “Pi day is a holiday that the math world made up to celebrate Pi,” said Mrs. Gleave, math teacher here at SJHS.  On this day, students in Mrs. Gleave’s class discuss pi topics like how many digits of pi they have found, who has memorized the most digits of pi, and how long it took them to recite it.

Deep down everyone loves to sing. If it’s in the shower, or in the car, or just for fun, for everyone to hear, or for nobody to hear, everyone loves to sing. In Master Singers, these talented students love to sing anywhere and everywhere.  Master Singers are a group of ninth-grade boys and girls who auditioned in eighth grade to become the best singers at SJHS. This choir is taught by SJHS’s choir teacher Mrs. Walker.        

Swish! The fabric and colors fly as the Springville High School Winter Color Guard tosses, spins, and dances around the Springville Junior High’s gym floor.

For the students who do not know, color guard originally started as a military tradition. The military would carry their country’s flag and two rifles. They carried the flag in an appropriate position and showed great respect for it.

Some think St. Patrick’s Day is a holiday where you wear green, and pinch people who aren’t wearing green. Others believe it’s celebrated because a leprechaun man saved Scotland. But what is it really? St. Patrick’s Day is a day celebrated worldwide by Irish people and many non-Irish people. Celebrations are generally themed around things green and Irish. Celebrations include wearing green, eating Irish food, and attending parades. According to stpatricksday.com, the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, Ireland is part of a five day festival, with over 500,000 people attending the 2006 parade!

Forbidden love and tragedy. These things can be found in Mrs. Rice’s ninth grade Honors English classes. Mrs. Rice’s sixth and seventh period classes have been studying The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. They took a break from the story to explore ideas from the text in a writers’ workshop. Writers’ workshop is an experience to improve one's writing ability by choosing an idea from a book and exploring that idea in a text. When asked about writers’ workshop, Jennifer Bate, ninth-grade student, said, "I feel that it’s interesting to dig deeper into the meaning behind the pages of the story."

Springville High cheer and drill teams came on Friday, March 4th to our school and performed for the SJHS girls. They came to show the eighth and ninth-grade girls their dances and get the junior high girls excited to try out for cheerleading and drill team. They told the girls how to sign up and the requirements for it. Eighth-grade girls can’t sign up until next year.

Staff members, playing card games during school. Who would have thought of this? Once in a while Mrs. Johnson, an assistant principal here at SJHS takes cards to teacher’s classrooms. Teachers draw cards; they have played one game so far.

Mrs. Johnson came up with this idea because she wanted away for the teachers and other staff members to talk and get to know each other. This started in January around the first of the month. “The card games are about making the staff feel like a family and to get to know each other,” said Mrs. Johnson.

On Friday, March fourth, Springville Junior High’s eighth-grade foods exploration class made pancakes.

“We do Pancake Day as part of our Carbohydrate and Quick Bread Unit. We just learned about quick breads, and pancakes are a pour batter quick bread. So...we made pancake,” said Mrs. Luke, the foods exploration teacher at SJHS.  Quick bread(s) are breads that use a leavening agent other than yeast to cook making it quicker to fix. Some examples of quick breads include pancakes, cornbread, biscuits, muffins, and waffles.

Many students in her class enjoyed the activity, and loved getting to eat the pancakes. The students loved that they also got to celebrate National Pancake Day.