Families of 7th and 8th graders are welcome to participate in our first quarter project- a family game night – on October 26 from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Students created games focused on building community and practicing concepts from classroom content. This event will take place in the library, cafeteria and gathering area.
Content Connection: This quarter’s content instruction centered around building community. Students learned about concepts of geography in Social Studies and matter and reactions in Science. In Language Arts they read about young people finding their place in their community and school. Bible focused on who do people say Jesus is. As teachers instructed their content, they kept coming back to the driving question of “How do we, as students of Lancaster Mennonite Middle School, build community?” Each week they also worked collectively, across subjects, to apply the design process to create their own unique game. Students began the interdisciplinary unit by playing games to get to know one another and to look for commonalities and specific traits of games. They then learned about game theory in design class and created their own rubric for project evaluation in Language Arts. From there they worked in teams to create, test, and perfect their own game based on content learning from the first quarter. This unit helped students to understand that creating complex games requires planning and revision, that collaboration requires very defined roles, that a rubric can be used to identify goals and objectives, and that applying concepts learned in class shows authentic understanding. They also came to know how important clear instructions are! LM’s Middle School program seeks to make these important interdisciplinary connections so students have authentic and meaningful ways to apply their learning.