The Spillway

Tomorrow night is the 8th Grade scheduling meeting at Anderson County High School. All 8th grade students are required to attend. At the meeting information will be shared on Course Clusters and how to schedule for the 2025-26 school year. The times for the meetings are 5:00 PM and 6:30 PM in the Anderson County High School auditorium.

All Norris Middle School students had the opportunity to hear an important presentation from Ms. Lisa about online safety and making smart choices in the digital world. Her insights were eye-opening and gave students the tools to protect themselves online.

Thank you, Ms. Lisa, for empowering our students with knowledge! Let’s all continue to stay informed and look out for one another.

May 20th: 6th grade field trip to Knoxville Zoo. Parent chaperone Google sign up and more information will be sent out in April.

ELA: This week, we began our Poetry March Madness unit where they filled out their own brackets to see who will have the winning bracket in the end! Each day, we are analyzing and annotating poems for poetic devices and how they impact the theme and tone. We will be continuing this into next week and voting to fill out our class bracket.

Math: iReady Teacher-Assigned Lessons – This quarter, students will complete teacher-assigned lessons on iReady instead of following their individual pathway. There are five total lessons that students will complete over the next few weeks. While students are welcome to work ahead, each lesson has a specific due date. To receive a passing grade, students must score 67 or above on each lesson.

Weekly Spiral Review – We are continuing our weekly spiral review to reinforce key concepts. Please ask your child to show you their spiral review along with the due dates for each set of questions to help them stay on track.

Current Math Unit: Rational Numbers – Students are continuing to explore rational numbers. Next week, we will begin working on writing and graphing inequalities as well as plotting points in all four quadrants of the Cartesian plane.

Important dates:

• Friday, March 28 - Spiral Review Quiz for week 2

• Friday, March 28 - iReady Teacher-assigned lesson over Dot Plots

Social Studies: As we returned this week from Spring Break, we utilized Monday to review standards with students. We played a competitive round of review Jeopardy as a fun way to refresh students’ memories. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday administering the last sixth grade benchmark! For the remainder of the week, we focused on Ancient Rome standards such as learning about Roman achievements. Next week, we will be wrapping up this final unit.

Important Dates:

• April 1st: Ancient Rome Unit Test & Study Guides Due

• April 22nd: TNReady begins (Social Studies section May 1st)

Science: We returned from a much needed Spring Break this week! In order to refresh our students on previously learned standards, we played an interactive game of Science Vocabulary BINGO, reviewed in small groups, and worked on whole group review as well. Mid-week, we finished our Spring benchmarks and then continued diving into our end of quarter standards. We worked specifically on learning about Biodiversity and Human Impact. We ended the week with students working on successfully completing an Escape Room about the human impact on the environment!

Important Dates:

• March 28 - Human Impact on Biosphere Quiz

• April 7th-11th Shark Week! (Standards Review)

• April 29th: Science section of TNReady

ELA: This past week students built background knowledge on the Japanese Internment Camps for our memoir titled, “Farewell to Manzanar”. Next week students will focus on perspective and compare and contrast standards while reading the memoir, “Farewell to Manzanar” along with other related poems. Students will write diary entries from the perspective of characters in the memoir. Students will also take a 10 question quiz on poetry standards.

Social Studies: This week we took the third and final district benchmark assessment for social studies. We reviewed on Monday, and then students took the test on Tuesday and Wednesday. Scores were very satisfactory, especially considering we haven’t covered all of our standards yet, and the assessment included a survey of all of them. Only a very small percentage of the grade level did not reach or exceed their state projections, and if we account for the standards that will be covered thoroughly before state testing, we should be looking at a lot of success on the social studies TCAP! This is a testament to the hard work your students have put forth in social studies this year, and we are very proud of them! Thursday we started our unit on the Protestant Reformation. We began learning about Gutenberg and his printing press, William Tyndale and the first English translation of the Bible, the growth of literacy and spread of knowledge, the Protestant Reformation (split with the Roman Catholic Church), Martin Luther’s teachings on faith alone and Biblical authority, and John Calvin’s idea of predestination. Next week we will finish this unit by looking at the Reformation specifically in England with Henry VIII and that whole debacle!

Science: Students wrapped up learning about Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration this week with a quiz on Thursday. Encourage students to complete quiz corrections as needed. We are now tracking Carbon on a great scale with our next standard about the carbon cycle:

1) Develop a model to depict the cycling of matter, including carbon and oxygen, including the flow of energy among biotic and abiotic parts of an ecosystem.

Math: In math class next week, students will be comparing two different data sets. We will be using dot plots and box plots. We will be comparing mean, median, mode, range, and interquartile range. We are also reviewing for the upcoming state testing. Please encourage your students to work their hardest on these reviews.

Happy Spring! ELA will be focusing on standards reviews paired with ongoing mini units to challenge students in research and communication. Please put the first TCAP on the calendar for Wednesday, April 16th as it is less than a month away! Students will kick off TCAP season with the Writing portion that morning. Please reach out with any questions or concerns.

8th grade math students completed the Spring Benchmark this week. We will be discussing areas of strength and weakness when we receive reports from Mastery Connect. Students also began learning about the use of the Pythagorean Theorem with right triangles. We will wrap up this topic next week and review all of Unit 6 in preparation for a unit test late next week.

This week in science we have started to do a spiral review over our standards to prepare for state testing. Students have finished packet one and have tested over it. As always, quiz corrections for the test are available, they are due March 26. Next week we will be moving into our second review packet. This will include Earth's systems and Earth/human activity. Students will have a test on Wednesday, March 26. We will be using a variety of tools to review, including, texts, videos, and a fun review game!