Classroom+News


 * January 21- January 25, 2008**
 * By Betty Zhou 7-4**

WE THE PEOPLE OF 7-3 AND 7-4 ARE SIMPLY AMAZING.. This week in Humanities, we were mainly focusing on Chapter 11 in //A Message of Ancient Days// and the book talks, which are going to be on the following Monday and Tuesday. The books we chose were supposed to be of a genre we’re not entirely comfortable with. Doesn’t that sound fun? Well actually, I’m sure tons of people in both 7-3 and 7-4 were able to take pleasure in their book. Like me x]. We also managed to throw in a worksheet on run-ons and a lesson of vocabulary with the time remaining. With that being said, I’mma move onto Math and Science. This is the first week that the Seek ‘n Speaks have been presented. The presentations will continue until March 13th. So far, the bar is set high. So congrats to the people who’ve already gone. That’s the major thing we’re all rushing to finish. Or should I say start? “So what’s it like?” “Well, it’s like...that” And that’s what the Seek ‘n Speaks are like. //That.//

Students got their report cards on Friday and it has been a long week!
 * By Zee Shin 7-3**
 * 1/18/08**

In this week, we wrote a compare and contrast essay about both the Minoan and Mycenaean civilization. Students who didn’t bring / print their essays experienced the terrifying wrath of Ms. Ahnemann. We also wrote a journal entry from the view of being non-citizen of Athens and each polis got points for their representative’s journal entries.

On Monday in Mr. Brown’s class, we had short quiz about algebra and we solved algebra related homework. We also talked about the feasibility study that we needed to know for Seek n’ Speak, how to make the formula and what makes good Seek n’ Speak presentation. We also talked about which variable should be the dependent variable and independent variable.

On Friday when we were about to get our report cards, there were a lot of people groaning and afraid to see their report card and I found out that I also was one of them. Students, who have been doing their “arête” (personal best) who satisfied their teacher, got a 5 for grade.

This week is over; give yourself and teachers a big hand for your / their fantastic work. If this week is over there is always next week coming towards you. Next week, in my predictions, 7-3 and 7-4 are going to write an essay about Athenians and Spartans. Next Monday and Tuesday we are going to have book talk and on Tuesday we’re also going to have a test on Greek civilization (MAD chapter 11). Let’s study hard for the test, get a good score to make Ms. Ahnemann, the wise Athena, proud of us.

Week: December 3-7**
 * By: Ji Hwan Kim 7-4

We are almost done with our book “__Trojan War____”__. As a polis, was preparing for our drama plays based on the book. As we act them out, Mrs. Ahnemann gave out polis points as we do our drama with passions. We also started Seek n’ Speak project by finding the rough draft of our article that is innovative, benefit to City in the Sea, and one that can answer our Big Burning Questions. Well it was a hard week and it will be harder the next week, because we have to study for our end-of-unit test on cells.

By Emily Liao 7-3**
 * Week November 19 – November 23, 2007

Hey, 7-3 and 7-4ers! What a busy, action-packed week we had! Four tests and a baby shower, such excitement!

Racing against time on Monday, everyone struggled to complete the CITS volume assessment; hopefully, everyone finished on time. Wednesday brought us the vocab quiz for lessons 4-6, and not to mention the volume test on Friday, which concluded our math unit on volume. The volume test was essential for determining our math grade, and with any luck, we will all be satisfied with our scores on Monday. 7-3ers also took an end of the unit test on drugs, and everyone was overjoyed to learn that our health unit was finally over. Furthermore, everyone had a laugh during English while watching our classmates perform short skits for the first four chapters of The Trojan War.

Adding to all that school work, we were also required to construct a 3-D model of our own original CITS apartment unit for homework that was due on Friday. Whew! Good thing 7-3ers had a thrilling shower and brunch during mentoring class on Friday for Mr. Stephen’s new son, allowing us to relax amidst alluring cinnamon rolls and pumpkin muffins!

ISB swimmers went to Singapore for the swim meet, and I wish everyone good luck! Next week will be another exciting one; remember that we have a diagnostic linear test on Wednesday! And don’t forget, next week is SPIRIT WEEK, which I am really looking forward to. The MS Dance is on next Friday too, so don’t forget to bring 20 kuai to buy a ticket!

Math & Science**:
 * By Ferris Wang 7-4

In math and science class, we made floor plans of apartments for the city in the sea. We sketched out floor plans, which were to scale. We then used chip board to construct this design. We have been studying volume, we are measuring different prisms and 3D shapes were what we did and practiced. On Thursday there were AMC tests, “American Math Competitions”, good luck! Social Studies & Humanities:

In social studies and humanities class we have been studying about the Greeks. We have picked new acrons, with the oracles guidance. The acrons are Cindy Liu (Corinth), Thomas Kwong (Sparta), Simba Chen (Athens, and Michael Reymond (Delphi). We have acted out parts in our class to maintain further understanding with what we are learning. The study of the Greek unit will have much drama. Good luck poleis!

This week in humanities, we started our Greece unit with the daily studying of the myth book and journal entries. In our simulation of Ancient Greece which we had started the week before, our polises or city-states started on our first big project which was to make a banner or flag for our city-state and present it to the class. It was important to cooperate and share the work as we were evaluated based on a rubric and a big chunk of it was teamwork. In math, we started our unit on volume with a homework and two problems of the day. In science, we started our life science unit. In one activity, Mr. Brown brought us downstairs to the fish tank near the Middle School entrance and we observed the living characteristics of a flame and a fish. A flame has so many living characteristics that we learned how people before thought it was living. Our homework that night was to follow up on that activity by telling whether viruses are living or non-living and why.
 * By: Michael Reymond 11/4/07 7-4**

Week of October 29 – In science we are beginning our unit on cells and discussing what is the meaning of life. . . in the scientific sense. In math we will begin to explore the concept and calculations of volume. We will be using our model of the City in the Sea to explore volume. The citizens of the city have debated how much space a family of four needs to live comfortably. With this information, we will be able to determine the volume of housing needed for our neighborhoods. We will then compare what the students decided to provide their fellow citizens in the city with the space they live in at home in Beijing. That should be an interesting comparison. I look forward to talking with you late this week about your child’s progress this year in math and science.
 * By Mr.Brown**

By Harry Tokaji 7-3 October 8 – 12**
 * A Restless Week At ISB

Swoosh! Another hectic week seemed to have passed by so quickly. Nothing’s better than a good rest in the weekend, after all, we had two tests! And besides the two tests, we started planning our city in the sea. These were the two main events this week and I have been enlightened with new information galore. This week didn’t lack one thing, and it was tests, tests, and more tests. The two tests that overwhelmed me were the matter and the integers test. To me, the word ‘test’ is taboo. Every time a teacher says the word ‘test’, my spine sort of tingles and my heart beat starts beating away like a drum. The thing about tests is that they take up a whole lot of your grade. I wouldn’t be half as panicked if tests only take up a bit of your grade. Just by messing up a test, an A+ could drop down to a C. Anyways, in my opinion, the matter test was harder than the integers test because of the short time limit we had. I just wish I could say that this is the only week with tests… To me, the city in the sea project is very amusing, as I can partially understand how it is like to actually construct or build a city. Planning is usually one of the most difficult and crucial stages when engineering a city. If you can’t organize your plan properly, it is most likely that you cannot create an attractive piece of architect. In my plan, I have a variety of buildings including police departments, universities, restaurants, etc. It’s got a nice layout and I am hoping that I can actually construct a city just as gorgeous as the one in my plan. As much as I don’t like tests, I have learned a lot through them. Heterogeneous mixtures, homogeneous mixtures, compounds, elements, etc., all this stuff is still swirling around in my brain. And I’m just glad that we were able to start planning the city in the sea. Through the city in the sea planning, I learned that scaling is very important. By using the scale, you can understand what size is suitable for buildings in the city. If you don’t know how to use one, you could end up with a building 30 times larger than ISB!!! When reflecting back to these two things, this week was extremely chaotic. I don’t know if there’s going to be any other week that’s just as eventful as this one…

By the way, remember to rest up this weekend because next week, we have the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS).

In English we had a long discussion about stereotypical characters and watched some of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It is a great movie but I like the old one better simply because Johnny Depp makes the character of Mister Willy Wonka scary when he is supposed to be funny. We also did vocabulary lesson 2. Math, Science this week was fun as well we got to re asses our wants and needs list and we had our first problems of the day graded and we spent one whole class debating which made Science SUPER FUN!!!!!
 * By: Anonymous**

This week was absolutely great! This week we went on our mentoring trips. It was a awesome environment to strengthen bonds in our class and definitely formed some friendships and made us closer as a class

One of my favorite activities was the wild art, even though we got into trouble with the manager for picking up to many flowers (you have to keep the place beautiful, right?). But we also found other cool things like a feather and a perfectly symmetrical cylindrical rock which was pretty cool. My group made a piece called Sunny Peace. It was a spiral of orange and yellow flowers (vivid color on the pavement) with the rock which had a sunflower and a ‘feather of peace’ as the centerpiece.

I also liked the bikes, at first they were really hard to control but after a while it got easier. It took us a while to figure out that the person in the passenger seat wasn’t doing anything at all to help the bike move it was there for no purpose. While coming back from the tennis courts our bike chain snapped of and we had to exchange the bike for a new one!

Another thing I liked was the swimming / bowling at the end. It was fun in the swimming pool because there was virtually no one there but the bowling alley was jam packed. In the swimming pool there was a slide which was really cool even though it was for babies. One of the guys at the pool had a disposable underwater camera which was really fun to use the only problem was you couldn’t tell if the camera was in the right spot or not. By far one of the coolest things was the girls bathroom. There were three rooms, the changing room with the lockers, a shower room with all these complimentary toiletries and a third multi purpose room which had a massage bed, a life size tree made out of plaster (it looked real) toilets, massage showers and Japanese baths. I wouldn’t switch going to the pool but next year I would suggest 3 activities.

We also had a dance where we did the limbo! Michael in our class won! It was a tight competition in the end with Jo Jo and Michael but Michael pulled through to win with an extremely low bar. There was also a break dancing showcase and we captured the teachers dancing. !?!?!! WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN!?!?!!


 * __Week of October 8__**
 * By Mr. Brown**

This week our students have two End of Unit Tests. Wednesday’s exam is in science on matter. Friday’s exam is in math on integers. The students will be provided with study sheets to prepare for the tests. The study sheets are available in the Math Science Homework Link.

Next week is IOWA testing on Tuesday thru Thursday. In the afternoons our students will be joining 90 other grade 7 students to build Instant City. This will be our first attempt to construct a City in the Sea that will be a great place to live, work and play.

On Monday, everybody in 7-4 and 7-3 had turned in their auto biographies to Mrs. A. We revised them, and then we took them home for further revisions. One thing Mrs. A taught us was “N2SSWSW” (no two sentences start with the same word, I found N2SSWSW is a very useful way of remembering about now starting with the same word in a paragraph. I liked the part when we did the “back to back” activity. It was fun because we got to sit back to back with somebody and describe the word we were given. Most importantly, we had the Terry Fox run for life. I enjoyed it, and I think most others also enjoyed it too. Over all, we had fun, and learned at the same time! J
 * By: Stephen Wu 9/29/07**

In English we had a long discussion about stereotypical characters and watched some of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It is a great movie but I like the old one better simply because Johnny Depp makes the character of Mister Willy Wonka scary when he is supposed to be funny. We also did vocabulary lesson 2. Math, Science this week was fun as well we got to re asses our wants and needs list and we had our first problems of the day graded and we spent one whole class debating which made Science SUPER FUN!!!!! This week was absolutely great! This week we went on our mentoring trips. It was an awesome environment to strengthen bonds in our class and definitely formed some friendships and made us closer as a class One of my favorite activities was the wild art, even though we got into trouble with the manager for picking up to many flowers (you have to keep the place beautiful, right?). But we also found other cool things like a feather and a perfectly symmetrical cylindrical rock which was pretty cool. My group made a piece called Sunny Peace. It was a spiral of orange and yellow flowers (vivid color on the pavement) with the rock which had a sunflower and a ‘feather of peace’ as the centerpiece. I also liked the bikes, at first they were really hard to control but after a while it got easier. It took us a while to figure out that the person in the passenger seat wasn’t doing anything at all to help the bike move it was there for no purpose. While coming back from the tennis courts our bike chain snapped of and we had to exchange the bike for a new one! Another thing I liked was the swimming / bowling at the end. It was fun in the swimming pool because there was virtually no one there but the bowling alley was jam packed. In the swimming pool there was a slide which was really cool even though it was for babies. One of the guys at the pool had a disposable underwater camera which was really fun to use the only problem was you couldn’t tell if the camera was in the right spot or not. By far one of the coolest things was the girls bathroom. There were three rooms, the changing room with the lockers, a shower room with all these complimentary toiletries and a third multi purpose room which had a massage bed, a life size tree made out of plaster (it looked real) toilets, massage showers and Japanese baths. I wouldn’t switch going to the pool but next year I would suggest 3 activities. We also had a dance where we did the limbo! Michael in our class won! It was a tight competition in the end with Jo Jo and Michael but Michael pulled through to win with an extremely low bar. There was also a break dancing showcase and we captured the teachers dancing. !?!?!! WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN!?!?!!
 * By Georgina Sheridan**

On Wednesday, our class started a topic about influential people. Ms. Ahnemann brought in a Time magazine that had the top 100 most influential people, and everyone clambered over everybody else to see it. Some people did not get to see it, and they went online to find the people in the magazine. In Math, we went over presenting the Problem of the Day, and some people presented. Only a few people actually volunteered to present. When people presented, a lot of their faces grew really red (unless you’re Georgie). In the end, David Barbalas made a breakthrough, and the presentations were deemed gradable. Also, on Friday, we had a problem of the day assessment. There were 3 problems, easy, normal and hard. Most people did the normal problem, but some people did the hard problem. Zee actually did the normal and the hard problems. WOW! To have gotten a full score on this assessment, you needed to do the problem correctly, explain what you did, and think of a new way to do the problem. This assessment was not graded, and the time limit for it was 30 minutes. On Friday, as everyone left for home, the one topic on everyone’s lips was the mentoring trip. The 7th graders from last year told us it was an amazing trip! We look forward going to it!
 * By Michael Shum**

We are in the future. The ice caps have melted as a result of global warming and the water levels have risen dramatically. What we are doing in the city in the sea project is making a scene of what will happen because of global warming. This week we are starting this huge project that will span a good part of the school year. Here is what we have done this week. We each got a map of our countries (the country which you have a passport of) from the global news bank website and we used Photoshop to make it seem like that the water level has risen about five-hundred feet. All of us were surprised to see that so much of the earth will be underwater once the glaciers and ice caps melt. We also had to search up about how many people will be displaced with all the flooding and write a paragraph about how the global warming will affect our countries.
 * By Steven Zhao**

By Kiley Venables 7-4** The past couple of weeks, our class, 7.4, has completed a project entitled “Help us! We’re sinking!” In this project, each student had to simulate a rise in sea level of 500 feet, as a result of global warming: the melting of the Polar Ice Caps, Greenland, and glaciers around the world only a few of the causes for rising levels. It is greatly exaggerated, but it shows just how many problems we would have to face if this were to happen. Each of us took a topographical map of our home country (or passport country) from the internet. We put it into a Photoshop program that allowed us to modify its features, and we filled in all the area under 500 feet so that it became part of the sea (or ocean). But that was only half of the project. Next we had to get a rough estimate of how many people were displaced in the big, slow flood that we were simulating. By doing a bit of research, we each got a really close figure. With this, we just wrote a little paragraph about our country’s displaced population, and problems that surfaced as people moved inland to suddenly fertile areas. Putting these into a Microsoft word document, we printed each one off, and voila! Everyone had simulated a rise in sea level of 500 feet, with an explanatory paragraph detailing problems the countries would face along the way. Good job everybody for your awesome effort, and what a great start for a year in seventh grade!
 * Help Us, We're Sinking!

By Celine Tee 7-4** 7-3, and 7-4 made a list of questions that would need to be answered if we were stranded on a boat. It goes like this;
 * The Big Burning Questions

Mr. Brown tells us to close our eyes and imagine that we were on a boat. It was a magnificent boat. It had everything we needed. The food was fantastic, the rooms were wonderful and everything was perfect. One day, I realize that the boat isn’t moving at all. I stop to think about it and soon, decide to go for a swim. Soon enough, almost everyone notices to boat’s halt. We gather about and ask to speak to the captain of the boat, Mr. Brown. He tells us that the boat has engine issues, and not to worry, he will fix it soon. We all calm down a little. The next day, the customers onboard have more questions, so they look for the captain only to find a note saying; Dear Customers, I am very sorry. I have left this crew ship with my crew in search for help. Please be prepared for the coming year or so. I should be back in maybe 2-3 years. The maximum years would be 5 years. Stay here. It would be much safer onboard. Sincerely, Captain Brown & Crew

The customers were storming mad, but could do nothing about it, except to live their rage in their minds. Questions arose, and we wrote those questions down on these posters. Soon, these questions became large posters posted around the room near the ceiling.