Ms.Q's Corner
CMP8
Our investigations this week looked at inequalities; how to solve them and graph them. We considered the amount of CO2 that cars and minivans emit to the atmosphere along with the constaints of car usage. Understanding how to shade inequality graphs, and the meaning of the shading were explored. We are completing this unit with a review and It's in the System Unit test will be next week.
CMP7
Students built models of prisms to calculate surface area. We compared the surface area of different triangular, square, pentagonal and hexagonal prisms all made from an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. Through our investigations we concluded that increasing the number of sides increases the surface area and the volume. We were able to see that as a prism became more cylindrical in shape, the more volume it held.
Science 7th/8th
This week we spent time reviewing test taking strategies to prepare for the science NECAP. Each day we began with several questions and worked together to discern what information the questions was asking for and ways to eliminate answers.
We continued our study of climate change by reviewing the hemospheric CO2 and temperature data since 1880. We created an atmosphere in two bottles and added CO2 to one bottle and left both of them under a heat source. Over time we collected data about the temperature change and compared the two to see if there was a correlation between CO2 and temperature increase. We found that the bottle with CO2 had a significant increase in temperature in comparison to the bottle with air.
Parents of 8th graders
Next week on Wednesday and Thursday, May 14th and 15th all 8th graders at WCS will be taking the NECAP science test. Over the last week, we have been reviewing test taking strategies and major science concepts. Students should plan on having a good breakfast and a good night sleep before we undertake this assessment. Thank you for your support!
Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up
Students continue to focus on a different spelling and witing concept each week throughout the month of May. For 5th graders, students learned how a prefix and/or suffix can build a word. 6th graders studied tricky words, espeically words with double letters and silent letters. All students practiced subject/verb agreement on their No Red Ink assignment. For our reading concept, students learned how to identify the main idea of an article by identifying the most important words.
In our Humanities PM time, we are practicing geography and mapping skills, learning about exact location - using latitude and longitide and relative location - using distance and direction to find locations.
Final drafts of the bottle/tap water argument papers were due today.
Next Week
Spring Assessment - On Wednesday, students will be taking the DRP (Degrees of Reading Power) assessment.
The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room
7/8 Humanities: This week in Humanities we spent our morning time together kicking off our Myths and Legends unit! This will be our final unit of the year, and students will end up creating their own myth or legend about the creation of a global geographical feature of their choice. We’ve spent our time so far creating definitions for the terms, building a large graphic organizer to keep track of all the stories we read aloud, and reading some great examples of myths or legends. Students have really enjoyed the read alouds so far, and we’ve been having great discussions about the literary elements of each story. During our afternoon time together we started our global geography unit. We started off by viewing a video titled “25 Maps to Change Your View of the World”. After watching the video we discussed how viewing these maps changed our view of the world. Knowing that we would be looking at a lot of maps during this unit, we turned our focus to absolute location and learning about latitude, longitude, the equator, the prime meridian, and how to read maps. Students used latitude and longitude to find cities around the world, and also played a thrilling game of “Message in a Bottle”. Students used the lines of latitude and longitude to rescue castaways from a shipwreck! This was a lot of fun, and students had a great time getting used to reading the global grid. Starting on Wednesday students began work on the “National Geographic A-Z Global Scavenger Hunt”. Students are in teams of 2-3 using 1 atlas to find geographic features around the world - the real challenge? The answers for each clue have to go in alphabetical order! Let the challenge begin!!
The Global Connections Project: Connecting students through learning from VT - NZ!
Weekly Update: This week we had our first Skype session with Blockhouse Bay Intermediate, and it was a great success! Students on both sides of the globe had a great time and asked great questions. Here are some tidbits from our conversation:
Q: Do you actually eat a lot of Kiwis (the fruit) in NZ?
A: Yes! There are two kinds of Kiwis - green and gold.
Q: What is your favorite American TV show?
A: America’s Funniest Home Videos!!
Q: What is your school day like? What is school like?
A: - Recess or outdoor times 3 times a day
- Eat lunch outside and get hot lunch or prepared lunch from a concession stand type building
- No hallways or corridors! They walk outside to get from classroom to classroom
- They can go barefoot in school!
Q: Where do you go on vacation or holiday?
A: Australia, Fiji, India
Right now we have built a new online classroom via Kidblog, so soon our students will be able to do CNN Student News blogging with our Blockhouse Bay peers! We are also working on an interactive global map that all students will be able to access and work with for their global geography unit.
The Week in Ms. O’s
Math 5: Yippee! Just finished Unit 6. Our next pursuit is to investigate the story of multiplication of fractions and decimals.
Math 6: Variables and Patterns is proving to be a new and interesting challenge for students. Our discussions have focused on variables (what are the variables we are relating in any given situation), how tables and graphs can help us understand patterns and relationships amongst variables and the desirable task of graphing, which I know everyone just loves. This unit is all about generalizations for linear and nonlinear patterns and is really important algebra prep. We will continue to plug away and towards the end of the year, secure fluency of numbers in all formats and do a little geometry! Productive week for sure!
Science ⅚: What a busy week! We have been organizing a community connection around bottled water and have made some important discoveries about bottled water use in our school. Our fact finding mission began with some early writing and editing and testing and writing and editing again, of a school wide survey to ask about practices around tap and bottled water. More than 350 people completed the survey and we will spend Monday analyzing this data. Students in “the plastic recovery team” have been collecting plastic bottles in classrooms at the end of each day. It is really unbelievable how many plastic bottles we have collected, given that we are not collecting in the cafeteria each day. Other tasks this week included: the life cycle of a product (tracing a product we use daily back to its natural resource origin) and watching iMovies from the Human Body Project.
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