January is moving by quickly

     The first month of 2020 has sped by and we are almost ready to put on SciencEXPO next week! We have a busy week (what's new about that, right?) ahead of us with the EXPO from Wednesday to Friday, Grandparent's Day on Thursday, and Parent Visitation Day, SciencEXPO presentations, and One Act plays on Friday...whew! We are also traveling to Lankenau Hospital on Wednesday morning for our annual wellness and health education program.

     This past week we finished our school-wide celebration of Hispanic Heritage with a wonderful Community Time activity reflecting what we learned and appreciate about the Hispanic cultural contributions to our school, community, country, and the world. Thanks to the Diversity Committee for making this such a great event and a month of learning!

MUSICA EN GYM

LA CABEZA EN EL MPR

ARTE EN CAFETERIA

The First Semester flew by! Here we come Second Semester...

     I can't believe First Semester has ended and the second half of the year is already here! Report cards are out next week and SciencEXPO/Parent visitation day, along with Middle School Grandparent's Day, is right around the corner in the first week of February. Frozen, Jr.  practice is in full swing for many of our Grade 6 classmates and a very successful basketball season is fast approaching the playoffs...whew! Oh, and tests and projects are all in that mix, too (hopefully, they are a priority).

    Here is a quick photographic sampling of what we did in and out of class the first half of the year. There was definitely a lot of learning and a lot of fun going on at Holy Child Academy!

Science and Grade 6 activities

     Students in Grades 6 and 7 are wrapping up their SciencEXPO experiments and working on getting their data into Google Sheets. This allows our researchers to make data tables and graphs for their research papers. Plus, it is a great skill to have moving forward!

Table 1	Weekly Plant growth (cm)
Plant Number	12/17	12/26	1/2	1/9	1/16
1	2.0	4.0	5.0	8.0	12.0
2	2.0	6.0	7.0	9.0	12.0
3	2.0	6.0	7.0	8.0	11.0
4	2.0	7.0	9.0	10.0	14.0
5	2.0	3.0	3.0	6.0	9.0
6	2.0	5.0	9.0	14.0	17.0

     Grade 6 celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr.'s and Cornelia Connelly's birthdays with the rest of the HCA community on January 15th during a prayer service hosted by the 4th Grade. It was a moving ceremony filled with songs, shared dreams, and history.

Tom giving the 6th Grade dream for the kids at Sonshine Academy

to the 4th Grade prayer leaders.

Grade 7 has been exploring cell growth and the stages of the cell cycle, primarily mitosis. Here they are viewing onion root tip specimens and identifying IPMAT stages. Not sure what IPMAT is? Ask a member of the Class of 2021 for the answer!

SO LONG 2019 AND WELCOME TO 2020

    We have picked up in the new year where we left off in the old year: BUSY! The first thing we did was welcome our new 6th Grade student, Tyler. He lives right here in Drexel Hill and is a great addition to the Class of 2022.

Welcome, Tyler, we're thrilled you're a Dragon!

   

     We were so busy before the holidays that not all of the fun was previously shared in the blog. So here are some images that didn't make it into our year-end blog due to the publication deadline:

Grade 6 Class Pollyanna

Class Pollyanna

Christmas spirit...and food!

     In the Science classroom, our students have been busy with many activities to 

demonstrate their learning:

Grade 5 working on energy transfer in a pond ecosystem

Grade 8 demonstrating their knowledge of isotopes playing a very competitive game of Gimkit

Grade 7 extracting DNA from their own saliva and learning about 

DNA base-pairs by constructing a simple model of DNA 

Grade 6 is exploring properties of minerals and (trying) to make rock candy crystals...I think I made the recipe incorrectly, but it was a teachable moment about responding to failure!

Grade 6 testing the streak properties of different minerals

Finally, SciencEXPO 2020 is almost here! In this image,Tom is gathering data on cookie recipe preference with the help from one of his test subjects, Arrington

.