By JESSA PEASE / Staff Writer

CALERA— Model rockets filled the sky above Calera Middle School Friday, March 4, as the eighth-grade students culminated nine weeks of study on Newton’s law.

“The Sky is the limit: Rockin’ out with rocket science” activity encompassed every class in the eighth grade, according to math teacher Chelsea Rutledge.

“The entire eighth grade is involved,” she said. “Pretty much everyone that teaches an eighth-grade student has had some part in it whether they were supervising or they did a project in their classroom.”

In science, Christopher Oravet said the students have been studying Newton’s laws, air resistance, momentum, speed and acceleration. They used this knowledge to build model rockets.

They had to choose how they wanted to attach fins of the rocket: Flat against the body or sticking out. Oravet said it was about balancing stability and speed.

“Anytime I am in the lab or outside with them, they learn better, and it’s better for everybody,” Oravet said of the activity. “You get a lot more out of the kids. They are more engaged.”

Orarvet aided all the students in shooting their rockets into the sky, and Rutledge said the students will be calculating the rocket’s speed using distance and time. Using those factors, the students can create scatter plots and write prediction equations for their rockets.

Science and math weren’t the only classes incorporating the space theme, though. In English, the students watched the movie “October Sky,” about a small town 14-year-old boy who built a rocket and became an engineer with NASA.

Family consumer science studied astronaut food and how it is created. They also competed in a cupcake design war, allowing all the eighth-graders to sample the cupcakes afterward.

In band and choir, Rutledge said the students learned space-related songs, and the art classes created decorations for the hallways.

“(Collaboration) helps it stick,” she said. “It helps them relate that science class and math class, they go to two separate rooms for it, but it’s still connected.”

All of the students had a good time during the event, Rutledge said, and they encountered rockets of all kinds, such as the rocket that never came back, the rocket that caught on fire and the rocket that never left the launch pad.

Next year, the teachers said they hope to include the entire school in the event, instead of just the eighth grade.

“We’re super excited,” said English teacher Lindsay Uhguin. “We’ve wanted to do this for a couple years and it just never worked out. This is the first time we have been able to put this all together, but it’s going really well. We are really excited about it.”