Have you ever wondered what the daily life of an eighth grader is like? Well, guess what? Now you get to know!
Eighth grade is a unique point in life, it’s the beginning of the path towards high school, and also the end of our middle school journey. At PKS, we eighth graders have a pretty consistent daily schedule. We start the day with an advisory. Advisory is a 20 minute period, where we play games, talk about things like decision making, friendship, and managing stress, or sometimes we just hang out! A typical Chinese class is based on some kind of authentic Chinese material (like a Chinese soap opera, or music popular right now in Shanghai). In math class, we are currently learning about polynomials and geometry. Eighth grade schedules are set up with a break after the first two hours. After the break we have English class. In English we are reading Echo by Pam Munoz-Ryan, and our project is connected to english so we are going to write a story in the world we create.
8th grade is about to show 7th grade their final language project!
Something very unique about Presidio Knolls School is our project classes. Every year in middle school, we complete four projects. The first project in 8th grade is always a Language project where we invent our own language. We completed this project a few weeks ago and opened a language museum for a day. The project we are all looking forward to the most is a storytelling project, where we travel to Taiwan to live with an indigenous group high in the mountains.
After our last class, we have electives! Every term we receive a different selection of electives. Examples include, PE, mixed-media art, drama, Math counts, STEM, and even mah-jiang.
7th Grade showing off the food they made for their regional food project.
During 8th grade there are many different opportunities to help the community. For example, once a week during Chinese class we visit lower elementary to help little kids with their Chinese. A PKS tradition is for eighth graders to teach middle schoolers about digital privacy, and how to responsibly use school devices. As 8th graders we also attend other grades open houses. This year, the whole school was invited to attend seventh grade's food open house, which included seventh graders homemade serving food based on different provinces of China.
In Middle School we also get the opportunity to start a club. The purpose of clubs is to help the PKS community come closer together.
This year Mia, Amelia, Maile, and I (Gemma) created the Make A Difference club. A club that focuses on helping not just the PKS community, but the whole community around us. It includes an Asian American Pacific Islander branch, to help people feel more accepted in the PKS community. Other clubs this year are the Queer Straight Alliance, Volleyloon, (balloon volleyball, an example of a fun game club), and Model UN. These clubs are all student led and run, with help of a teacher advisor to oversee the club activities.
Dude, we are living the life in 8th grade right now!