April 2011

Every year Mrs. Walker conducts an eighth grade all-girl choir class known as Knightingales.  There are currently 65 girls in Knightingales, and everyday they work on classical pieces as a choir.  In seventh grade most of the girls participated in a mixed choir known as the Apprentice Singers, but when students hit eighth grade they had to divide into seperate boys and girls choirs. This helps prepare and develop the students voices for Master Singers when they will be mixed again as a boys and girls choir.  Kahaia Stewart, an eighth-grade Knightingale at SJHS, said, “It’s a bummer we don’t have the boys here, they always liven things up.  But it’s a good opportunity to help us focus on our voices.”

Jazz band is where students learn how to play their instruments better and also sharpen there skills in song playing. “It gives the students extra performing opportunities,” Mr. Booth, SJHS band teacher said. The students learn songs from all sorts of genres like jazz, Latin, rock, and R&B (Rhythm and Blues). Currently the jazz band class is learning Superstition by Stevie Wonder, a jazz version of the Sesame Street, and a song by Santana. Jazz band is learning these songs so that they can play them for a concert in May. The class is performing during school in an assembly.

Most students think that English is all about reading and writing, but there are many more genres of learning to add to it.  The eighth graders in Mrs. Breakwell’s English class wrote songs about a movie called West Side Story.  Mrs. Breakwell said, “I thought writing some songs would be a nice alternative to writing an essay, and I thought it would be a good chance for multi-genre work since we were experiencing a musical.”

The students in Mrs. Breakwell’s  English class had the chance to experience and display their musical sides.  The students got together in groups of four and brainstormed lyrics that would display the way they understood  the movie.

Eighth-graders in Mrs. Rice’s English class have the opportunity to participate in radio shows for a book that they have read.  They read parts of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Then they listened to the radio show. Mrs. Rice said “We talk about verisimilitude, which is the literary quality of seeming real. Then we research apocalyptic events and make our own apocalyptic radio shows. We write scripts, select sound effects, table read, and then record the shows.”

Almost everyone knows of the classic movie The Princess Bride. It’s a story of romance, swordplay, giants, an evil prince and a beautiful princess. But does anyone really think about it as a quest? Mrs. Breakwell, an English teacher at SJHS, is teaching her students about the quests cycle. According to Mrs. Breakwell it was a good idea to apply the quest theme into our school learning.