MS Director's Note: Looking back at Fall Semester 2025

Terra Lynch, Middle School Director
From persuasive projects to holiday performances, our middle schoolers closed out the semester with creativity, curiosity, and community spirit.
 
The last week has been filled with joy and excitement as we “wrapped” up the door decorating contest (thanks to Community Leaders for creating Pitso Pizza on my door but note the photo features only the 6th grade CLs), experienced the talent and enthusiasm of the MS Jazz Band and Music Elective at the Winter Concert, watched short and hilarious creations from the MS Film elective at Pitso, saw a gallery art wall go up in Building 8, settled into basketball season, and worked on class projects. As a reminder, Electives and Outdoor Education classes change in January, but all other classes remain the same.

Whether analyzing nonfiction and fiction, creating persuasive presentations about biomes, writing story books showing their knowledge of neurodiversity, documenting observations of the moon, planning and enacting skits in Spanish, planning and taking trips off campus using Cap Metro, creating in film, photography, art, improv, and journalism: the middle schoolers have an impressive range of academic work to show for this semester. 

Sixth Grade

English: We are on week 3 of our big project around “Calpurnia,” where students choose a mode of their analysis–including graphic approach, a museum exhibit, and an audio podcast–to clearly describe characterization, setting, theme, dialogue, and author’s tone and its impact on the narrative.

Becoming Human: We finished our unit "Welcome to Earth," in which we studied how natural processes like erosion, weathering, and plate movement shape Earth over time, and how human actions can speed up these processes and affect both the environment and people. We have begun Unit 3, "Welcome to Humans," which explores the history of life on Earth and how scientists study evolution.

Science: Sixth grade is in the middle of our Space unit. Students have been keeping moon journals to record their observations of the moon and will continue to do so through the winter break. We’ve discovered, through a kinesthetic demonstration, how the sun, earth, and moon interact and have completed independent research on stellar evolution.

Sixth Grade Middle School Orientation: Students are working on their final summative activity: creating a storybook encompassing the key themes they have met during the second part of the MSO course. These include neurodiversity, gossip and rumors, and non-violent communication as a means of conflict resolution. In the last class of this elective, we will be celebrating with a party, which the class has organized as part of their “Let Grow” project. Students had already undertaken a series of personal independent projects, such as going shopping, house cleaning, tidying up after their dog (poo picking), and more!

Seventh Grade

English: Students are on week three of our big project around “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” where students choose a mode of their analysis, including a graphic approach, an Instagram-style aesthetic series of posts, an audio podcast, and a slide series including an image with supporting texts (while including all of the structures of text). This nonfiction book helps us focus on various text structures. 

Becoming Society: Students have been studying the governmental systems of the powerful civilizations of ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome to understand patterns of power, fairness, and vulnerability that still apply to governments today. They are finishing up the unit with a summative assignment that analyzes what makes each strong or weak.

Science: Students are researching biomes, and creating presentations as if they are an eco-friendly tourism agency, in order to persuade classmates to visit unique and biologically diverse parts of the world. 

The 7th grade MSO students planned and carried out their Student-Led Field Trip to the University of Texas, where we met one of our parents, Jeff Gross, who leads the Molecular Science Department. Students navigated public bus routes, located the dining hall, and coordinated a meet-up spot before beginning a mini tour of Jeff’s lab where they learned about the lab’s work with over 100,000 zebrafish used in research focused on visual system disorders.

Eighth Grade

English: Eighth Grade is reading and annotating The Hate You Give, answering questions regarding vocabulary and meaning, and correlating the book’s themes with contemporary events in the world.

Becoming America: Students are completing research projects analyzing the historical inaccuracies in the film Pocahontas, and showing their analysis in the form of an infographic, video review, or written film critique.  

Science: 8th-grade students have explored metal displacement (redox) reactions through practical laboratory work, learning to make predictions based on the relative positions of metals in the reactivity series. In the final lesson of the semester, they will measure temperature changes that accompany a series of reactions and relate these observations to the energy released or absorbed, linking this understanding to energy-level diagrams.

Spanish

Students in Irena’s Spanish A class are learning Christmas vocabulary and using familiar words to write simple recipes and describe holiday foods. They are also exploring holiday traditions in Spanish-speaking countries and creating travel itineraries, using vocabulary they already know in the activities.

Students in Natalie’s Spanish B classes have been talking about one of everyone’s favorite topics: food!  Students drew and described their Thanksgiving meal in Spanish, and ordered in Spanish from the One Taco food truck a couple of blocks from our school.  To finish up the semester, students are writing and performing a restaurant skit, featuring dishes from a Spanish-speaking country of their choice!  ¡Buen provecho!

Irena’s Spanish C Students are comparing Christmas customs across countries, writing short paragraphs, and presenting their findings to their peers while reinforcing vocabulary they have practiced.

Spanish D & E are wrapping up the semester with the unit La vivienda (dwellings). Students practiced the vocabulary by quizzing each other through games like Headbanz, creating and labeling houses, and describing real homes from the Spanish-speaking world.

Electives

  • The Middle School Studio Art class has had a wonderful semester, producing impressive work both individually and collectively. Two notable projects stand out: the basketball court mural that students created during a C Day in September, and our final portrait project. For the mural, we took a field trip to Shoal Creek to gather visual research and collaborated with muralist Emma Schmidt. Our culminating project focused on developing portrait drawing skills, which led to a geometric portrait painting project. This work is now featured in our class exhibition in Building 8 during the final week of the semester.
  • MS Film students are hard at work creating Hallmark-style holiday movie trailers with their own comical twists.
  • Students in both Middle School Jazz Band and the Middle School Music Elective put on an amazing performance at our Winter Concert!  Here is a link to lots of photos and videos.
  • Improv is playing holiday-themed games in class this week, cracking each other up, and exploring how to become food in various forms.
  • Photography students are creating a "best of" album in lightroom so they can download all of their best images for safekeeping, then they are further selecting 3 from these to print. We will have a class critique on the last day, looking at their favorite printed photographs, and then they will take their works home.
  • In Journalism, students completed their final drafts, peer edited, and submitted them into an internal website – our version of a newspaper documenting school life. Interviews, reviews, comics, and the like. 
  • For the Smart Lab culminating project, students selected a project they were most proud of—ranging from coding projects and 3D-modeled prototypes to Minecraft Redstone systems—and created a final presentation to showcase their work. Through this process, students reflected on their learning and practiced clearly communicating their ideas and design decisions.
Back

Springs Campus

List of 1 items.

Creek Campus

List of 1 items.

River Campus

List of 1 items.

As a 501(c)3 non-profit school, Headwaters School does not discriminate because of race, color, creed, national origin, religion, gender, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other classes protected by federal, state, or local law in its admissions, financial aid, hiring, or board membership processes.