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.

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.

Caption:  Seventh graders show which Life As… books they read.  Front row, left to right:  Marin Rosenberg, Kimber Hicken, Sarah Christensen, Sheylah Buhler, Stephanie Aragon, and Lexey Anderson.  Back row, left to right:  Darren Hooley, Samantha Allan, Kenya Rodriguez, Erika Funkhouser, Tyler Werner, and Cody Larsen.

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