Middle School News

A new middle school class is providing students with a hands-on, interdisciplinary learning experience rooted in nature.

Molly Hasegawa is in her third year as a member of our middle school math team. We recently sat down with Molly to discuss a little bit about her love of math and the role community plays in her life and teaching practice, and to learn more about some work currently being done by our middle school math students.

Ask many Nueva students who have completed the sixth grade what a highlight of that year was for them, and you can expect to hear them talk about the Egg Drop in their physics class. Considered by some as a Nueva middle school science “rite of passage,” the Egg Drop is a culmination of weeks of learning, brainstorming, prototyping, iterating, and testing in which students apply Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Sixth-grade students, with the help of science teacher Cristina Veresan, investigated the wonders of the underwater world and the effect of the moon on the ocean in their elective, Between the Tides. 

While FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team captain Lucy D. was building the chassis, build team lead James T. was working on the flywheel launcher, Jason C. was busy creating the intake, and Howard L. and Anton P. were building the wobble arm. This was life for the Sharkbytes, who worked together remotely to design, build, and program a robot for the 2020–21 FTC competition.

Every unit in Sam Modest’s sixth-grade humanities class begins with a discussion about a current event. The most recent unit began with an article about California Governor Gavin Newsom adopting a law to study and develop proposals for reparations and the final project turned students into activist-experts to improve a fictitious reparations bill. 

In the new fall 2020 elective “Colors of Nature,” seventh- and eighth-grade students explored the notion that people of color have different access to and privileges in the natural world. Through class discussions and creative journals, students reflected on how environmentalism and racism are intertwined. Eighth-grader Jax C. shares an introduction, and three students—Anika G., Kayla L., and Anjuli M.—reflect on their experience in this course. 

Viewing the world with an artist’s eye. Creating projects rooted in empathy. Empowering students with iteration and innovation. 

Throughout the past year, I-Lab engineer and Hillsborough shop manager Christine Braun has been a fixture on the Hillsborough campus, using the I-Lab as her home base while teaching, leading, and planning for design thinking-related initiatives. She is also a lit club facilitator for a seventh- and eighth-grade lit club.

Toward the end of October, fifth-grade Earth Science classes completed the fall study of Earth’s composition and the rock cycle. To help students solidify their learning and set it in stone, students created models of the rock cycle using upcycled or ephemeral materials found in their homes.