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Welcome to Mr. Libertucci's website!!! 8th Grade English is a very important year for many reasons. Our first priority is to prepare you for the rest of your school days at Schalmont High School. You will be given more responsibilities throughout the course of the year. We also have a New York State Assessment in April.

It has been a while since I last reported on the progress of our class. First I would like to congratulate and thank our 8th grade team for their generosity. Together, our team raised $528.22 in a can drive to benefit the American Red Cross. The money was sent to the Haiti Relief Fund.

In class we have been reading the novel Peak, by Roland Smith. The novel is about a boy who gets into some trouble and finds himself climbing Mt. Everest. To go along with the novel, we have been watching a Discovery Channel series called "Everest." The show documents a climbing season on Mt. Everest. Using both tools, the students have been able to "experience" what it is like to climb the tallest mountain on Earth. The focus of our studies has been to examine the relationships between the characters, and how people motivate each other to succeed in challenging situations. One of the activities that we have done in class was to strap a backpack filled with 30 pounds on, and walk around the room. Some of the students tried it, and got a real life feel of how much weight the climbers carry on their backs as they climb. We will finish the novel on Feb. 12.

The past few weeks have gone very quickly in English. The kids started reading The Outsiders in class. The kids typically love this book, and our student teacher is excited to be reading it with them. To go along with the novel, the kids will be creating "Facebook" pages for all of the characters. They will work in small groups and create a page on a large piece of paper hanging in the room. The kids will update the characters status, and comment on each other's walls as the novel proceeds. The goal is to make the kids act as though they are their assigned character, and respond accordingly. So far the assignment has gone very well. We also took our first quarter vocabulary test today. Overall the kids did very well. The songs, although cheesy, seem to be helping the kids understand the words that we are studying. My advice to the kids at this point is to keep working hard. The quarter ends on Friday.

This week we welcomed Mr. Markham to our class. He is a student teacher from Oneonta College. Mr. Markham will be with us until December. We started reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow this week. It is a fun story about the Headless Horsemen. It is a difficult story to understand due to some difficult language, but we are stopping rather frequently to discuss. Ask your student to describe Ichabod Crane to you. They drew pictures of him in class, and I hung some of them around the room.