​Story by Eads Fouche

In Mrs. Michelle Proffitt’s ceramics class, students have been learning how to create mugs. In the process, they learned techniques like slab construction and how to use a paper template to create pieces of a mug. The mugs took three classes to construct.
           
In the process of making the mug, there were multiple steps. At the start, students created a template to cut the slabs of clay. Proffitt said the hardest part was “rolling out the big slabs for the side of the mug.”
           
The second step was to create the sides of the mug and put it on the base. Most of the shapes were simple cylinders, but according to Aidan Simoneau, seventh grade, one student made a mug with a curved lip and another made a mug with a wide bottom, skinny middle, and a wide top like a vase.

Simoneau envisioned his mug to be big and thick so he could drink out of it, but it turned out to be small and thin.

Jagger Albert, seventh grade, a student from first quarter ceramics, made his mug based on a football theme and the handle looked like laces.
           
The next step is to create the handle. The handle must be thick and secured well to the side so that it does not fall off in the kiln.  Simoneau wanted his handle to look like the McDonalds “M.”

After finishing the handle, the mug gets fired in the kiln, and after that, the next step is to glaze.
          
The glaze is the layer over the clay that gives it its color. Albert chose yellow and black. Once he got the glaze, he shook it for five minutes. This gets the glaze ready to be spread on the mug. To get a good overall color, Albert suggested “double check the glaze for a good thickness.”

Albert glazed his football-themed mug yellow and black, while Simoneau glazed his mug orange because he likes the Florida Gators.                                                                                                                                        
The final step is to put the mugs in the kiln to harden the glaze. They then are fired and given back to the students.
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“I really liked this project and would do it again,” Albert said.

Story by Alan Bettner

Can the seventh graders make peace between the two countries?

Well that’s what Mr. Ryan Snyder, seventh grade social studies teacher, wanted to see, putting his seventh graders to the test.

The argument between the two countries has been going on for decades, and a lot of people want this argument to stop and the two countries to make peace – including Evan Neukam and Nicholas Edwards.

“Mr. Snyder split the class between yes and no,” Neukam said. Edwards wanted to be on the ‘yes’ side because he said “Down the road, I think they will make peace”.

​Snyder said, “I wanted to show my students how hard it is to settle agreements in the Middle East, and what their take is on the conflict.”

He wanted to get the students more interested in the topi, and it looked like it worked.

“I’m glad that Mr. Snyder brought me into this topic and I was very interested to see if we could solve this conflict,” Edwards said. “I think it is important to learn more about the Middle East then we already know.”
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Story by Aidan Brown

The students in Mr. Sean McVey’s class got a sweet treat this week when they got into studying the Layers of the Earth.

The Layers of the Earth is the second science chapter of the year for McVey’s class.

Students enjoy this subject because they get to understand the layers of the earth “through the model of candy,” McVey, seventh grade science teacher, explained.​

“I think that students should know about the layers of the earth because we have never been passed the crust (surface) of the earth,” McVey said.
Braden Smoker, a student from McVey’s science class, said that he believed knowing what was down below the Earth’s surface was a big part of our lives because we lived on the earth. He explained that it was our job to know.

The Earth is broken down into four sections, the crust (surface), the mantle, the outer core, which is melted metal, and the inner core, where pressure is so great that it’s a dense chunk of solid metal which still hasn’t cooled down since the Earth’s beginning.

To understand the layers better, McVey handed out pieces of Pretzel M&M’s to his students. Each student took the candy and bit straight into the pretzel, making the Pretzel M&M a tasty model of
Earth’s Layers, with the pretzel as the Core, the chocolate as the Mantle, and the hard outside as the Crust.

The Layers of the Earth included learning about tectonic plates, convection currents, and how volcanoes were created.

Smoker said that he liked learning about the layers of the Earth because it was interesting to learn about something he had no experience with.
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“I think that learning about the Layers of the Earth is important to everyone, not just students, because we live on Earth,” McVey said, “It’s our home.”