It’s an exciting day on the seventh grade hall.

Well, every day is exciting when you teach seventh grade. But TODAY is particularly unique as students are visiting their Charger Trails Rotations.

Rotation 1: Harmful/Thoughtless Language Seminar
Rotation 2: Wonder Wall Mural & 9/11 History Room
Rotation 3: Y1K/Work Room
Rotation 4: Cranium & Collaboration

Rotation 1: Harmful/Thoughtless Language Seminar (Arielle Curtis)

We talked about what language was, what were the different types of languages, and also what were the positive and negative effects of language. My group decided that language was a way of communication between two or more people. We also didn’t limit ourselves to spoken languages, like Chinese, Arabic, or English. We said that body language, physical contact, music, art, written words, they’re also languages. We decided that language can build people up, or tear them down. Even the simple things can ruin someone’s day. We put on skits about positive use of language, where people build each other up with compliments, congratulations, and even just opening doors. However, we also put on skits with negative use of language, in which people tripped, pushed, critized, teased, and mocked each other. The victims were left looking dejected, beat-down, or hurt. Thankfully these were just skits. In some places, those skits were real life for people. Some people would be ridiculed everday. These skits alerted us to the fact that we did not want to be either the vicitm or the bully, and more importantly, that we wanted to keep that sort of negative behavior out of our CA community. This seminar was very informative as to what people face and to what we want to avoid.

 

Rotation 2: Wonder Wall Mural & 9/11 History Room (Ryan Azrak)

In this rotation I was able to learn about all the different volunteers and people that were involved in the devastating  9/11. we heard stories from  survivors and how they were able to get out in time before the twin towers fell. But we also heard from family members of the ones who perished. Also we had the opportunity to contribute to a Cary Academy tradition of putting your hand print in the seventh grade hall staircase. It was very cool hearing about all the stories of how people from the upper school come back and look at their hand print and think about there memories of seventh grade. This was my favorite seminar by far.
Rotation 3: Y1K/Work Room

Here, students had the option of working on a variety of upcoming projects, including Y1K, their poetry compilations, or getting ahead for next week’s workload.

 

Rotation 4: Cranium & Collaboration (Meirav Solomon)

We started out talking about different types of learning and how we learn. Then we proceeded to play Cranium with our groups of 4. In the game, you can land on 4 different squares which represent different categories. One of the categories was Creative Cat where you had to either make something out of clay or draw something. To move forward, you had to guess it correctly and then roll the multi-sided die. This rotation was not only  fun but very informative. I learned so much from this seminar and I hope the next 7th graders can enjoy it too.