Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up
O the Joy! We completed the westward journey of Lewis and Clark, noting the changing landscape (Great Plains, Rockies, Coastal Range and Columbia River area) and the incredible story of Sacagawea and her impact on the journey. We will be moving on to part 2 of this lesson next week - Westward Expanision.
Students also selected a favorite writing piece from their Writer’s notebook to post on our Kidblog. Students self and peer edited, and commented on other witing once published. Students will be wrapping up their mystery and spook literature group round next week. A final constructed response will be written based on our big question: How does the setting of your book create a story of mystery and spook?
Ms. Q's Corner
CMP8
This week student's grappled with exponential decay, decay factors and rates. We explored how medication loses it potency over time and that the decay factor is less than 1. We reviewed positive and negative exponents, rules of exponent use, and became more familiar with square and cube root tabs on our graphing calculator. Next week we will review exponential growth and decay in order to prepare for our Growing, Growing , Growing Unit Test.
CMP7
Becoming more fluid with utilizing positive and negative integers with all mathematical operations was the name of the game this week. We introduced the distributive property and practiced moving from factored form to expanded form. We played positive/negative integer bingo and reviewed for our unit test that took place on Thursday.
Science 7/8
We were eggcited to perform our eggcellent egg bungee on Monday. Using the app "Fast Camera" we captured the bounce of our bungee jumping eggs to see which egg came the closest to the ground without touching. Many jumpers didn't make it and that's no yolk. On Tuesday and Wednesday we began our engineering task write-up. We began our study of Earth science with exploring the app called "Educreations". Students will be utilizing this tool to explain major concepts to their classmates.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room
7/8 Humanities: In conversation with a few students at the end of the day on Friday, we summed up our week as quite puzzling! This week our main focus was wrapping up our global studies unit. As usual we started off the week by doing some Independent Reading and writing in our Reading Journals, followed by current events in the afternoon. As the week continued on, we started tackling our BIG question for this unit which was: Who am I in the global puzzle? Students began tackling this question in the morning by doing a “Who Am I” or “About Me” poem. This poem had a pretty strict format, but still gave room for students to be creative. It motivated and encouraged students to do a lot of reflection on themselves as members of not only the Vermont community but the global community. Some students even shared their work with the class on Friday morning. In the afternoon our time together was spent on a table challenge. Students were asked to work with their table group (their “family” from the global village) to put together a 550 piece jigsaw puzzle without the cover and without talking. At the end of the class period they would have to break down the puzzle, so the next class would have to start from scratch. This challenge was to symbolize a number of things, but most importantly it was to symbolize how the world has to work together to solve problems. Sometimes when solving a problem you don’t know what it’s going to look like at the end, so you have to guess. Sometimes you won’t be able to communicate with everyone you’re working with, so you have to figure out new pathways in which to communicate. Sometimes after many minutes, hours, or days of hard work you have to break it all down to start from scratch. We had some great discussion in class about the symbolism of this puzzle project, and as a class we really made some deep, big picture connections. To wrap-up the week, on Friday the students put together their own puzzle. Each student was given a blank puzzle piece that they had to decorate to symbolize themselves. At the end of the day the students had to find the remaining pieces to their puzzle by working with all of the 7/8 community to put all of the pieces together. The outcome was several beautifully collaged puzzles with each student of the Voyager community being represented by the their own piece. As students were leaving on Friday I asked a couple students how they would sum up this week. Some words or phrases they used were “big picture”, “mind puzzling”, “lots of reflection”, “gained perspective”. It was a great week in Humanities, and by Friday we had really put together all of the pieces of our global unit.
News from Ms. O
The Hot Zone Literature Group: Students in this literature group are working towards finishing a very long and detailed book on the Ebola virus. I have extended the deadline for the project to the Monday after break. The book should be finished upon returning from Thanksgiving break and the Public Health Announcement on a contagious disease of their choice will be due the Tuesday after break.
Math 5: Students completed Unit 2 today with an end of unit assessment. This culminates our intensive work on multiplication and just touched the surface of our division work for the year. We will come back to division when we pick up fractions in a couple of units. We will begin geometry next week and continue this until December break.
Math 6: We are in the midst of ratio understanding...BEWARE! We are not all there yet, in understanding ratios that is, but are moving in the direction of deeper understanding of proportional reasoning. We will pick up this work again next week, by introducing integers (positive and negative numbers and absolute value). This will help students understand more about bits and pieces of numbers (some fraction, decimal and percent work) and how to compare their magnitude.
Science ⅚: We ended our week of looking at constructive and destructive forces with a Demonstration Fair. Students presented models that demonstrated a constructive and destructive force that could apply to the forces acting on the Earth’s surface. We had sedimentary sandwiches, exploding ketchup volcanoes, converging cookie plates, sandy dune construction, gravity riddled eroding embankments, and stream beds among others. It was crazy! Sometimes I wonder if having all this fun can also be called learning! Many students did an excellent job researching a simple constructive/destructive force and can now see, perhaps what they may not have had I just told them, what makes the Earth’s crust changeable. Yet another piece of evidence of the changing Earth! We have a test on Wednesday. We will spend Monday building our study guide, Tuesday doing active review, and Wednesday taking an assessment. It
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