In this current climate of severe budget cuts. AG parents should attend the March 23rd PAGE (Partners for the Advancement of Gifted Education) Meeting to show Dr. Reep support for gifted education! The meeting will be held at 7:00 p.m. in the Media Center at Eppes Middle School.
The FMS sixth grade TAG math classes have begun. Membership in these classes is determined by EOG scores and teacher recommendations. Students will be working on strategies for solving higher level, multi-step math problems. To test their skills, students are participating in the Mathematics Olympiad Competition, which consists of five tests given monthly beginning in November. The first test was given nation-wide on November 18(Matthew Meeks was the only FMS student who had a perfect score on this first test.); the second on Dec. 16(Connor Black was the only student with a perfect score on the second test). The sixth graders are learning that their elementary problem strategy of pulling the numbers out of a problem without reading the words and doing only one operation with those numbers does not work in middle school. The MO tests are the perfect exammples of multistep problems, which require the careful reading of each word.
Also on November 18, FMS participated in a world-wide math event, the American Mathematics Competition. Congratulations to A.J. Hardison, a seventh grader who had the highest score among FMS students. Students who are interested in math competitions are eligible to take the Mathcounts school test in late January to qualify for the Mathcounts team and the regional competition. Math practice sessions are now being held in Mrs. Hamilton's room on Thursday mornings from 7:45 a.m. until 8:15 a.m. and on Thursday afternoons from 3:45 p.m. until 4:30 p.m.
The school Mathcounts test was held on Tuesday, January 27, during 7th and 8th periods. The top four students--Tyler Walston, A.J. Hardison, Devin Finney, and Davis Martin--represented our school at the Regional Competition. Brandon Avery, Blair Pearce, and Charlotte Slaugher served as alternates. Matthew Meeks qualified, but strep throat kept him home. Our team missed qualifying for the State Tournament by less than 2 points.
This year FMS AG classes are focused around a universal theme--CONFLICT. Students have participated in a survey to discover their basis strategy(ies) for dealing with conflict. (Ask your child whether s/he is a teddy bear, a shark, a turtle, a fox, or an owl!) Each class is having its picture make while playing a part in conflict tableau. In moving from microcosmic to macrocosmic conflicts, students are learning to analyze the conflicts in the lives of famous people, beginning with Queen Elizabeth.
The nex unit engaged the students as historians. They imagined how people in the past thought to role play. They also analyze thed possible causes and effects of their event.
Currently, they are studying Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods," a musical which uses several familiar fairy tales to explore the conflicts of adolescence. Students are exploring the concept of archetypes and are finding that there are archetypal characters and conflicts, many of which occur within the family during adolescence. Usually found in folktales, mythology, and the Bible, archetypes are the first, best examples of a kind of person or conflict. For that reason, students can easily recognize these types in their lives and appreciate the fact that they are not the first human beings to experience the conflicts of adolescence.
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