TA’s Notes:
Please replenish students pencils, erasers and pens. This is something all students should have and many are getting low!
After school with Ms. Sherman:
It has been great to see students staying after school to get support with organization. This group will continue for the next few Wednesdays. The last Wednesday for organization will be on November 19, 2014.
The next set of Wednesday sessions will have a new focus, reading. This session will primarily look at: What to do when faced with high level text. Students, with guidance and support, will work through difficult articles. We will talk about strategies to use when reading text that is difficult and above their independent reading level. Students will also work on: responding to text, interacting with text, comprehension, and using context clues. The new session will start in December.
*All sessions are open for 5th-8th grade students!
*Wednesdays: 3:00-4:00
*Students are dismissed at 4:00 and can either be picked up at that time or go to the homework club.
*There’s an activity bus that leaves the school at 4:30ish.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We started the week off with the fall Writing On Demand Assessment. 5th - 8th grade students write a LEAF response to a grade level prompt using a provided set of information. This was our first attempt using computers to give this assessment. We used Google Classroom for the task. Students had access to all of the information online. They were to complete a graphic organizer first, before moving on to typing the response. Unfortunately for us, Google Classroom had its one major glitch of the school year on Monday. This set some students back and required an extra period or two later in the school week to wrap up the assessment. It was a learning experience for all of us and good practice for future online assessments.
For writing, we are diving deeper into our argument study, learning the components to a good argument piece. We used a common core student exemplar to identify the claim, reasons, evidence, facts, and concluding statement of a good argument paper. Students took notes on the components and started to collect a variety of persuasive sentence starters and transition words to use in future pieces.
In our civics unit, we have moved on to the Federal Government, taking a closer look at the 3 branches and the concepts of checks and balances and the separation of power. Students will be making a diagram of the checks and balances system and participating in a mock legislative experience next week.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: I apologize for the lack of update last week. It completely slipped my mind! We have had a busy couple of weeks - finishing up Unit 1 and moving on to Unit 2. Unit 2 has a main focus on fractions, what is a fraction, how can we compare one fraction to another in terms of magnitude and finally a focus on fraction addition and subtraction. As we talked about in conferences, Bridges 2.0 makes a lot of assumptions about where a student has been prior to this year, but we are cobbling together the framework to meet all needs. Our focus this week has been on using two models, the clock and money to build proficiency in adding fractions with unlike denominators. If we have 1/10 + ⅔, we can use the clock to help us solve this problem. 1/10 of an hour is 6 minutes, ⅔ of an hour is 20 minutes and therefore added together we get 26 minutes. 26 minutes out of how many minutes? 26/60 and you have an answer for this problem. We will eventually arrive at traditional algorithms, but it gives students a place to start! Remember to encourage 60 minutes of Moby Max Monday to Sunday!
Math 6: I apologize for the lack of update last week. I was over my head and totally forgot to get it done! Students have been working in our new unit, Comparing Bits and Pieces, and learning some new math, about how to compare two numbers, better known as ratios. It has been an interesting transition as this topic of ratios is new to most. It requires an immense amount of proficiency in multiplication, and once again, fluency matters. Encourage your 6th grader to get on Moby Max and work on Fact Master. They really need to put this skill, multiplication and division 0-12, behind them. Just a reminder, the weekly time expectation is 60 minutes. Our work on ratios has focused on making comparison statements like, for every 3 boys there are 2 girls in the classroom. These kinds of statements move students away from difference (subtraction) statements, like $150 more or less and into statements like “their goal is ⅓ of our goal.” The latter involve multiplication and move you more easily toward “for every” statements, or ratios. The learning curve in this unit has, in the past, been steep. I will keep a close eye on their progress and fill gaps where needed.
Science ⅚: This week students had the chance to view population size through the eyes of mice and weasels. Why do populations increase and why do they decrease? Mice are eaten by weasels and as a result, you have changes in population size. The simulation invited students into the world of ecological relationships in nature. And allowed them to see that populations do not grow out of control, or become extinct without some bigger interruptions in the ecosystem. Naturally, populations of predators and prey will control each other’s size. This was a really worthwhile activity for students and allowed for some interesting graphing, math analysis and writing opportunities. We are wrapping up our Ecology unit next week and moving on to adaptations, heredity, and evolution.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week has been filled with a lot of great week in both our morning and afternoon times together.
The morning classes this week continued their punctuation study on comma and quotation rules. Students took their comic strip stories and transformed them into typed, short stories. This was great practice for students to apply their new knowledge of the 7 comma rules and 8 quotation mark rules. Students in both 7th and 8th grade seemed to have a great time creating these stories, and seeing this project through both of its parts - comic and short story. As our week came to a close, we continued to practice our quotation and comma rules through entrance tasks. Students did really well on these! We also used our knowledge of commas and quotations to analyze and read Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Raven”. This classic piece of poetry was a really fun, challenging, and entertaining way to end the week. Students listened to a read aloud of the poem, analyzed the meaning with their table groups, and persevered through tough vocabulary to create a solid understanding and summary of this wonderful, yet eerie piece of literature.
During our afternoon classes we have turned our discussions to talking about the question of, “What does it mean to be a citizen?”. Students rotated through learning stations to read and respond to two articles about illegal youth immigration in the United States. Students were asked to identify a variety of things in the articles such as: the main idea, fact vs. opinion, point of view, and develop arguments with evidence from the articles. Students were really invested in learning about the stories of these young children trying to make their way into our country. Students participated in some respectful, wonderful discussion around why the U.S. is such a desired place to live, what is it like to be a parent of these children, and what do we do about this hot-button issue. Students will be continuing their work around “What it means to be a citizen” through their mini project on American Citizenship. The project is centered around the Naturalization test - giving the test, gathering data, and analyzing data. Students are really excited about this project, and I’m really excited to see the data they gather!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
The class did splendidly on a partner quiz this week and they clearly understand the exponential growth equation. They have been able to interpret the landmarks in a table and graph that show exponential growth. We moved onto exponential decay by investigating how flea medication loses its effectiveness over time. Did you know that fleas are able to jump up 10 inches! When they are pupating, insecticides can’t harm them. The medication that we use on our pets, show an exponential decay relationship, between medication level in the bloodstream and time. We have found that exponential decay equations show a decay factor that is greater than zero, but less than one. We compared tables and graphs showing growth and decay.
CMP7
We had all kinds of algorithms, videos, games and activities around adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative integers. We watched some excellently cheesy videos from PBS Math Club about mathematical operations with integers and we learned some memorable ways to figure out the product of two integers. For example, “If you love to love, you love.” (+ number x + number = + number) We also learned about the fabulous “love triangle” for multiplying and dividing integers. Students had a partner quiz this week.
Science 7th/8th
The top three finishers in our mousetrap car design project competed in one epic race on Friday. We had some very fast cars that were able to tear across the 5 meter length well below the 5 second constraint. Although, we had many cars that did not make it, the design and redesign process was fun, challenging, and sometimes frustrating. The design process takes us from solving a problem, to the design of a solution, the creation and testing of that solution and redesigning when necessary. We certainly had lots of redesign with our cars. Students had a science meeting Friday afternoon to discuss the observations that were made about their car’s performance and how it related to the scientific principles we are studying: inertia, friction, kinetic/potential energy. Next week our engineering lab reports are due.
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