Cajun's News Beat

List of 3 news stories.

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  Posse Foundation Scholar

  2/21/2020
  Country Day senior Kelsey Dinvaut recently received a Posse Foundation full merit and leadership scholarship to attend Notre Dame University next fall. 
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  Reflections in Writing

  12/5/2019
  Students in Mrs. Philipson's 8th Grade English class were asked to reflect on their time camping in North Carolina through a set of three poems. Two were haikus, each describing an element of nature they encountered on their trip. The third was a free verse poem that talked about an experience on the trip. These works ended up highlighting many elements from the trip - from the bus ride to experiencing a breathtaking view on the hike to being rained on in the middle of the night! The free-verse poem was a chance for students to practice creating using some of the tools they have been studying such as simile, metaphor, anaphora, antithesis, parallel structure, and allusion in their own writing. So how does such an assignment prepare our students for their life beyond 8th grade? According to Mrs. Philipson, "We spend a lot of time in 8th grade working on the analytical writing that will be the touchstone of literature courses through high school and college, and we really need to take time to stretch our creative writing muscle occasionally! In addition to analyzing how and why authors use specific tools in their work, we need to practice creating them so that we can use them in our own work."

   
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  Utopia - A 6th Grade Study of The Giver

  12/1/2019
  In Ms. Brennan’s sixth-grade English class, students were challenged to create a prototype of a Utopian society as inspired by their reading of The Giver by Lois Lowry. Upon culmination of their work, they will present their societies, working to convince people who want to move to a better place that their community is “perfect.” Students’ decisions about how to develop their Utopian society were informed by reading about styles of government, economic factors in a community, the role of education, the impact of the environmental factors, and the infrastructure needs of a community. After creating a planning blueprint, students then created a three-dimensional model or a computer-generated model of their society. All students realized that Utopian societies quickly become dystopian and all were challenged to be curious, creative, and to think beyond their own lives. After reading The Giver, students also recognized the beauty of having choices, pets, memories, freedom, love, color, family, and emotions.