Cross my Heart and Hope to Spy

Author's Note: In my pieces last year, I tended to struggle with Sentence Fluency. In this piece, I counted my sentence lengths to try to vary them more.

Gallagher Academy. A school for exceptional young women. To the world, that's all it is. In reality, it's a school for spies. Cammie Morgan, the headmistress' daughter, had grown up at this school and is a well trained spy.  She can speak fluently in 14 languages, and takes martial arts in gym class.  Then Cammie and her friends learn about "Blackthone". With teamwork, determination, and help from another spy school, Cammie and her friends have to fight to protect their school.

 I would strongly recommend this series for anyone who likes action. The author, Ally Carter, does a great job describing everything in the story. All the situations seemed real. The only thing I would change to the story is the ending. It isn't as clear as the rest of the story. Overall, this story was really good, and really fun to read.

Academy 21

Author's Note: I wrote this piece for the ACMS newsletter. The purpose of this piece was to inform people about what's new in Academy 21. Let me know what you think!

In Academy 21 both seventh and eighth graders are working hard on their first projects of the year. These projects include career exploration, taste testing, and  Cold War project. New to Academy 21 this year is the Project Management Schedule. All of the projects require students to fill out a project management form on Google Documents for all of their projects. This form has students assign themselves specific tasks, the status ( done, in progress, open), the estimated complete time, and more. It really helps students accomplish  their goals and it helps them with completing their projects on time. Students also have weekly meetings with their advisors. The advisors check the progress of the student's projects and Blogs.

Also new to Academy 21 this year is the 1:1 math program. Students still use ALEKS, but have 1:1 math meetings, weekly or bi-weekly with their assigned math teacher. Also, Academy 21 students are free to go to the math center anytime that they need help. Students in Academy 21 have all made a digital portfolio. This portfolio has links to the students blogs, projects, and their master rubric. This is useful to students because they can use similar portfolios later in life to display all of their work.