Week of May 27

New York City Field Trip

Just a friendly reminder to review the packing list and itinerary for the trip.  This information will be forwarded to you in an email attachment, if you do not have it available.  Start packing this weekend and prepare snacks and lunch for the trip.  We will be meeting in the WCS parking lot (near the tennis courts) at 6:30 am on 6/5.  We will load the bus, take attendance and depart at 7am. Please be on time.

⅚ Field Trip Update

We have exciting adventures planned for 5th and 6th graders!  On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of next week, we will be breaking from our normal schedule and leaving campus for trips to learn about ourselves, each other, and the world!  On Wednesday, we will spend the morning climbing walls at Petra Cliffs.  On Thursday, we will spend the morning at the ECHO Center learning about water quality and the conditions of Lake Champlain.  And Friday, we will host an artist- in-residence to build kites, an engineering task that will bring to life our learning about lift and drag and Bernoulli’s Principle.  If you did not receive paperwork, it will come home today.  Paperwork is due by the end of the day on Monday.

Ms. Quatt’s Corner

Math 7

This very short week began with reviewing for the Common Math Assessment.  Students worked on a review and we worked through questions in class.  The Common Math Assessment is given throughout the district for grades 1st through 8th and is used to inform instruction.  This assessment score will be reported for every student, but will not be factored into a final grade.

Math 8

The 8th graders were similarly working on reviewing for the Common Math Assessment.  These scores will be reported for each student, but will not factor into a final grade.

Science 7th/8th

This week we turned away from our engineering tasks and returned to our study of space.  Our overarching question:  What could life be like on other habitable planets?  We watched a TED education talk “A needle in countless haystacks: Finding habitable worlds”  by Ariel Anbar. We also read an article on how the planetary ecosystem could impact on the evolution of the creature.  Does the planet

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up ⅚ Language Arts and Social Studies

This week 8th graders presented their final 8th grade challenge work to the house.  The presentations were excellent and there were some very interesting topics and community connections shared with the audience.  Our classes were a bit shorter than usual, but we completed 2 media literacy lessons as a part of a short unit that we will be working on until the end of the year.  The lessons focused on kids as consumers, exploring ads, and the techniques that advertisers use to get us to buy their products.  We identified a number of techniques and analyzed some tv ads for these marketing strategies.

In Social Studies, the students are working very hard on their Create a Business projects.  Students are using Google Draw to create an electronic poster to share their business plans and products or services.  Students will be presenting their plans during the last week of school.   Today,  the ⅚ students participated in the ⅞ version of this project by acting as investors and choosing which ⅞ products to invest in with a set amount of investment dollars to use... ask your student about this experience!

News from Ms. O

⅚ Math:  Students spent this week working to complete units of fractions, decimals, and percents.  Understanding how we operate (not that kind of operate!) on these kinds of numbers will be essential for building skills in algebra.  Students also took the CSSU Common Assessment.  I will report out scores for each student in Jupiter Grades, but this score will not factor into this semester’s overall assessment score.  

We are not done yet though...

5th Graders will be securing basic computational skills while diving back into algebra.  6th graders will also be securing basic computational skills while applying them to algebraic equations and patterns in data.  

⅚ Science:  We continue to pick away at the ecology ideas around food webs and energy in an ecosystem.  We did quite a bit of modeling this week on food webs, with yarn, with prairie, ocean, and other ecosystem food webs in addition to talking about energy transfer, as one organism ‘passes’ its energy on to another organism who eats it!  We will do a predator/prey simulation early next week and finish the year with how organisms adapt to their environment.  

Coming soon...Look forward to the publishing of podcasts from our radio broadcast series, the New Frontier.