Blackhawk School District; Highland Middle School

Highland Middle School is a grades 5-8 building in the Blackhawk School District with approximately 750 learners. Our staff works diligently to ensure they are providing the learners with instruction that is at their academic level and that they cultivate relationships with all learners. Our learners are hard-working and kind young adults. They thrive when given motivating and unique activities to complete. Some opportunities for learners are listed below. Please check our website to see more amazing opportunities our learners have experienced.

All 5th graders participate for four days and three nights in an outdoor educational experience at Camp Kon-O-Kwee. Our learners experience a true combination of the environmental science curriculum with hands-on learning. Students at Blackhawk have been able to participate in this unique tradition for over 30 years. This is also quite the way for students to get to know each other, as they are together all day long for class, eating family-style meals, and even sleeping in cabins in bunk beds!

All 6th graders are given the opportunity to participate in the All Stars Program run through Beaver County Behavioral Health and the Keystone Wellness Program. This is a time for students to talk about their future commitments and discuss how drugs and alcohol could impact their future wants for themselves. The staff at HMS and students learn much about their peers’ future wants for themselves.

In 7th grade we offer Health Class for our students so they can learn about social, emotional, and physical wellness.

All 8th Grade students at HMS complete a student-designed science experiment for the science fair. On Monday, November 19th, the entire student body at HMS participated in a Walk Through of all of the 8th graders’ work. The younger students really enjoying participating in the projects and earning the prizes for each. They were also excited about thinking of future Science Fair topics. HMS would like to thank Mr. Bain and Mr. Stanton for braving the elements when HMS was experiencing the power outage to prepare and set up the gym for the Science Fair.

Not only are we able to offer unique opportunities for students in each grade level, all students throughout the building are in multiple programs that we are so proud to be able to offer. A few examples are below.

The PRIDE (Life Skills) class at Highland Middle School has been running Cougar Cafe To Go this school year from their classroom. This is a coffee/tea delivery service available for all of the adults in the school. Once a week the students also make a homemade treat to sell. Through this experience the students are practicing phone skills, money skills, conversational skills and so much more.

A unique offering that all Blackhawk students have is to participate in our music ensembles. Students may join Orchestra starting in 4th grade, Band starting in 5th grade, and Chorus starting in 6th grade. We are an advocate for a music education for our students and are incredibly proud of their musical accomplishments.

While all schools in Pennsylvania must plan lessons that focus on career awareness, career acquisition, career retention, and entrepreneurship as mandated by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, we wanted to ensure the activities our learners experienced were engaging and long-lasting. To help 5th grade students learn about entrepreneurship, the HMS guidance counselor, Mrs. Engle, compiled information on “kid entrepreneurs.” The fifth grade teaching staff will each teach a different lesson about one of these young entrepreneurs as the students rotate through their classrooms. Our fifth graders are very excited and enthusiastic about the event and we hope many will catch the entrepreneurial spirit as they talk about some invention ideas of their own! To celebrate the event, a raffle will be held the following school day, and students will have the chance to win some of the items that the young inventors created. For our older students, we have offered trips to local colleges like Penn State, trips to our Career and Technology Center, and opportunities to participate in the Energy and Advanced Manufacturing Partnership to learn about industries in our area.

We want to ensure that students at all levels are able to engage in hands-on activities across multiple classrooms. Students in grades 5-8 participate in our CATS and Related Arts classes which partner hands-on learning with curriculum. In computer, learners interact with programming language. They start out with drag and drop languages and progress to text-based languages. In Music, learners engage with theory and literacy through playing keyboards, music history though the lives of specific composers, the relationship between music and stories. In Technology Education class, learners experience everything from Computer Aided Drafting to 3-D Printing to circuitry. In Family and Consumer Science class, students learn skills from cooking to sewing to basic finance skills. In STEAM class, students focus on using hands-on materials to learn about our world and design solutions to real world challenges.

While we offer many programs during the school day as part of our curriculum, our HMS students are given the opportunity to participate in academic competitions as well. Due to their diligence and work ethic, they have a high success rate of qualifying for the state and national level of competitions.

The Technology Student Association is an academic organization that allows middle school and high school Blackhawk students to compete at the local, state and national level in a variety of academic competitions, explore technological careers, develop leadership skills, and participate in community service projects.

One school level competition was the Battle of the Books. Teams of students are challenged with reading 5 books from September to November. Two teams battle each other over questions specific to each book. The winning teams get their pictures taken to be displayed in the HMS lobby and can claim bragging rights until next year’s battle! If you’re interested in reading a good book, check out our Battle of the Books titles: Sounder, Shadows of Sherwood, House Arrest, Refugee, OK for Now, Esperanza Rising, Holes, The Losers Club, Freak the Mighty, and Wishing Tree.

We had multiple students participate in a “Forensics” county wide public speaking competition. The HMS students who participated took First, Second, and Third place in categories including Impromptu Duo, Extemporaneous Speech, and Storytelling. Congratulations to: Andrew Woods, Quinn Borroni, Noel Shackelford, Kendall Coddington, and Madi White.

Of our students who just recently participated in the county level Academic Games Propaganda competition, 6 qualified for the state competition. Congratulations to: Andrew Woods, Madi White, Kendall Coddington, Adelaide McMahon, Lila Darr, and Carter Merrell.

Max Rodgers, Zach Oliver, Dominic Eicholtz, and Jarrod Malagise at the Powering Pittsburgh Competition

Recently, a team of four HMS students: Dominic Eicholtz, Zach Oliver, Jarrod Malagise, and Max Rodgers, represented Blackhawk and all of Beaver County in an engineering competition held at Heinz Field. The competition challenges students to come up with alternative power solutions to power Pittsburgh and Heinz Field. The competition was sponsored by Shell and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Students presented their

ideas on a stage in front of parents, students, and engineers from Shell and the Steelers. They advanced in the first round that was held at the Beaver Valley Intermediate Unit in October and then competed against finalists from Washington, Allegheny, and Beaver Counties. The students won the competition and were awarded with $1,500 for STEM resources for Highland Middle School as well as box tickets to the December 2nd Steeler game, signed footballs and hats, and a trophy.

As you can see, at HMS we value the use of technology in our ever changing world. Students have use of laptops and iPads between every 4 classrooms. Additionally, as part of a technology initiative in the district the 5th grade classrooms each received 8 class iPads. The students kicked off the year with iPad projects in various content areas. These projects ranged from a character trait activity that allowed them to use their creativity to tell about themselves to working collaboratively on a video that explained the respiratory system. In math some students had the opportunity to “show what they know” about the order of operations with Apple’s “Clips.” Some students are currently using the iPads to produce a Book Snap based on a character from a book while others are researching Native Americans tribes and performing a reader’s theatre in front of a green screen. The teachers noted that the students are excited and engaged when using the iPads, and that they are allowing them to present information in ways like never before. Both the students and teachers are excited to explore the endless possibilities that the iPads will afford them!

However, we not only instruct students on academics and technology at HMS, we feel it is essential to teach the students about empathy and helping other. At Thanksgiving we have a Canned Food drive led by our nurse, Mrs. Haddox, our Family and Consumer Science teacher, Mrs. Andrews, and our students in Family and Consumer Science Class (FCS). Students across the building donate non-perishable food items and the students in FCS organize and box the items for families in our community. Additionally, from November through December HMS organizes Give a Christmas Activities like hot chocolate days, pajama days, and door decorating contests. All proceeds collected are presented to the Salvation Army at our Christmas Volleyball student versus faculty game.

At HMS, we educate the whole child. We focus on academics, relationships, and empathy. We are so proud of our students and staff and we can’t wait to see what our learners will come up with next!