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"The Middle School teachers are so good at knowing what's important to this aged child. The kids end up feeling connected to their teachers and to each other."
— a Middle School parent
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The mind and the developmental level of the middle school student naturally lend themselves to using the scientific process as a way to teach students about the world around them.
The Latin School curriculum, based on National Science Standards, integrates the Biological, Physical, and Space Sciences. Equal emphasis is placed on both scientific processing skills and on content knowledge. Students learn to observe, measure, experiment, think critically, and communicate their scientific understandings through a variety of methods.
Science 6
This year students learn to observe the world around them through the eyes of a scientist. They gain basic laboratory skills in a forensic science unit in which they are asked to solve a crime by gathering and analyzing evidence. Students learn how humans fit into the Animal kingdom as they study classification, animal behavior, and structure and function. Emphasis then turns to the basics of cell biology, including the history of cell theory and plant and animal cell structure and function. The next focus is learning about matter, including how to measure it, the structure of an atom, and how to use and read the periodic table of elements. The year ends with a look at the big picture of how biotic and abiotic factors interact in our ecosystem.
Science 7
Seventh grade science is an opportunity for students to gain understanding of their world and to begin to understand how the world works in relationship to themselves. Many concepts and ideas that have often been taken for granted, such as how the human body works and where sound and light come from, will be introduced and questioned.
It is through the conceptual understanding of their world, learning to ask questions, and then discovering answers that the students gain an appreciation for science. By balancing the inquiry process and conceptual understanding, seventh graders learn about humans and how the physical laws of nature affect their interactions. In addition to conceptual understanding, students to problem solve, qualify and quantify their observations, work with others, and communicate their knowledge in a variety of forms.
Science 8
How do the observations we make create the knowledge we believe in? How do we use the scientific process to establish a basis for our perceptions of the world? What do we now believe are the origins of our Universe? These are some of the questions that we attempt to face in this course. Using both historical and investigative methods for answering these questions, we explore science as a way of knowing - a method for meeting the unknown. Using the student's natural curiosity about the stars, the universe, and the basic laws of physics, we focus on the science skills of observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting. Wondering and questioning, reinterpreting and systematizing, creating models and resolving scale issues, and interpreting and developing mathematical relationships are examined as important processes in meeting and understanding the universe around us.
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