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.