TA’s Notes:
- Picture forms were put in all students mailboxes this week! School pictures are Sept. 24th- Envelopes must be brought in on the 24th with payment. If students would like me to hold on to their completed envelopes they can give them to me. If a second picture form is needed please have student see me.
- Friday afternoons I am gone at 2:00- please e-mail, call or encourage students to bring me notes about after-school plans before lunch each day! This will assure everyone knowing the days plans. Friday afternoons if you need to reach someone please call the Para Office at 871-6150 or Amy in the front office at 871-6100.
The Week in Ms. Q
CMP7
Geometry vocabulary, classifying geometric figures, finding common properties between polygons was the order of business this week. We played a challenging game called "Four in a Row" where we learned about angle rotation. We explored tessellations and transformations(flip,slide, rotate) and began creating our own tessellations.
CMP8
In Thinking with Mathematical Models this week we investigated both linear and nonlinear models. We created a“line of best fit” from data based on an leaky faucet experiment. We reviewed how to find equations from tables, graphs and points. Students completed their first math “check-up”.
Science 7th/8th
We began looking at what characterizes life. We read and highlighted articles, classified objects between living and nonliving and joined the debate on whether viruses are living organisms. We took a look the simple organism of yeast. We read about, discussed and experimented with yeast to see what life processes we could observe and ways to manipulate its environment. We learned about a form of anaerobic respiration or fermentation, a process that yeast go throughs to convert the energy of sugar to help it grow and to release CO2 and ethanol. We reviewed photosynthesis and cellular respiration through the lens of energy flow. Where does the energy come from that fuels our life processes and where does it go when we are through with it?
This week in Mr. Merrill’s Room - ⅚ Humanities
What a great first full week of school! We started our week off with Reading Cafe (a Monday tradition), students should have an independent or literature group book to read during this period. We talked about good independent reading strategies and skills. We used the end of the period to talk about our books and work in our Reading Response Notebooks. Students started their book list this time, and we made a general goal of reading 25 books this school year. Students should be reading at home 4 days a week for 20 - 30 minutes.
For our first wriitng assignment, students brainstormed rules that they would like to change in school. They joined a group to work with and build a case for their argument. They will be using their best reasons to write an argument piece using the LEAF format. This will be an important writing format for students to use and learn for many writing assignments.
Students are also preparing for a mock election next week. We read about political parties and learned about different systems used around the world. We completed a lesson on how to evaluate a candidate, which generated a great discussion and many good questions. Later in the week, students joined a political party (purple or orange) and are all preparing to run their own primary campaign to win the nomination for their party.
Their key issues to run on are from our list of rules we would like to change in our LEAF writing assignment (dress code, contact sports in middle school, playground rules, longer lunch and recess, no plastic bottled water, gum, use of technology, no homework).
Spelling groups were formed and students had their first spelling class this week. Your student should have a spelling book or packet.
We are also using some end of the day time to work on our Bottled Water Project. The students are in three different working groups - business, design, and presentation. We will be working with Camelbak to design and create our own water bottle for the school hydration stations. There was a lot of great independent and small group effort on this project.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room
7/8 Humanities: This was our first full week of school, so all of our the students got into the 7/8 groove by kicking off the week with Independent Reading in the morning and watching CNN Student News and discussing current events in the afternoon. Students were also given the outline and expectations for our weekly Kidblog posts on current events. Our focus this week in the morning was on two different topics under the “Grammer Usage Mechanics Spelling” umbrella. On Tuesday our morning we used the morning to discuss how to properly punctuate long and short pieces of work. We took our new knowledge to the test by taking on our first table challenge of the year! Students had a lot of fun with this challenge, and they were able to apply their knowledge even under the pressure of a timer. Wednesday our morning time together was used to learn about homophones, homographs, and homonyms! We discussed the most common homophones such as: there/their/they’re, to/ too/ two, your/you’re, and hear/here. Students got into groups and created fun sentences and artwork to represent a variety of homonyms. During our afternoon time together on Tuesday and Wednesday, students worked on their MMI sites. Their focus has been on their “About Me” section, but we also discussed how to set goals that are attainable and measurable. Thursday was dedicated to remember 9/11 through discussing the powerful stories behind everyday objects in the morning, and we dedicated our afternoon to our personal heroes. We did this by doing a journal write about who our personal heroes are and creating a “Heroes Quilt” in each class. The quilt is made up of images and words put together by the students. We ended the week by preparing for our quiz next Tuesday, and by starting to discuss our BIG question in the afternoon: What does it mean to be an American citizen? Our afternoon was filled with discussion around what it means to be an American. We brainstormed, read quotes, and watched a video on what it means to be an American. Over the weekend students should be asking their families: What do you think it means to be an American?
The News from Ms. O
Math 5: Diving back into our work as mathematicians, we began our week with a conversation about multiplication! Factors, products, and soon, multiples will be language you are hearing often as homework comes home. I have been pleased to see the inner workings of this group, as they make predictions and connections during a Connect Four type math game or see the difference between 2 and 3 dimensions when boxing baseballs for Brad’s company (one of our activities this week). We have also practiced regularly some basic fluency in multiplication and strategies for solving problems we have never seen before but are related to ones we know.
Keep up with HOMEWORK! IT IS IMPORTANT TO START THE YEAR OFF RIGHT!
We also began Moby Max, our online fluency and concept based learning program. We will send more information about this home next week.
Math 6: What a busy week of game playing! We played two games, the Factor Game and the Product Game. The games emphasized factors of numbers and how you know when you have found all the factors of a number. We also looked at the patterns we see in factor lists, for example, when numbers have only two factors or exactly three and how we might classify those numbers as prime or square respectively. I was super pleased!! with the number of students for whom these tasks were easy; a tribute to last year’s work.
The 6th graders have two ongoing projects that have been assigned this week. The first is a weekly assignment, due Fridays, in which students must post a photo of a mathematical pattern in nature (many were posted this summer, never fear!) and write a written description of the pattern. Each written description must contain the context of the photo, the pattern noticed, and some additional research about that mathematical topic with a citation.
The other project, My Special Number Project, requires students to make ongoing observations of their number’s uniqueness. As we learn, students will have 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there to check back in on their number to see if that new property or attribute is true or not true about their number. For example, if we learn about square numbers, an observation that I might make about my number 11, is that it is not a square number because I cannot build a rectangular model in which both dimensions are the same. This project is due on October 15th and the goal of the project is to write a children’s book about your number! Can be fashioned after the Three Little Pigs or Alice in Wonderland. And of course this written work can be an original masterpiece for the person who feels comfortable.
Science ⅚:
This week we introduced the idea of biodiversity and why scientists need to understand this when looking at the health of an ecosystem. We walked our schoolyard ecosystem searching for the biotic and abiotic factors present. We used this information to decide why some parts of our ecosystem are more biodiverse than others. We also discussed scientist error and lack of expertise doing this kind of inventory. This conversation was in service to the ideas that there are things we can never know about ecosystems, but that we are constantly considering how to better size up our natural world. We watched a TED talk about an ecologist who has engineer a plane that helps to assess biodiversity and why these kinds of technologies help us learn more about the things we can never know looking from the ground up. Ed Asner TED talk if interested. https://www.ted.com/talks/greg_asner_ecology_from_the_air
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