TA’s Notes:
- Field Trip permissions slips have been distributed for:
*All of Voyager House- Walking field trip to Adam’s Farm on Oct 15th- permission slips due 10/14
*5th & 6th graders- “Under the Golden Dome” trip to Montpelier on Oct 23rd- slips due 10/20
- Parent-Teacher-Student Conference sign-up sheets (google docs) have been e-mailed home. Please contact me if you need assistance or to set-up an different date/time.
- 8th Graders received forms for Washington DC trip. Permission forms, behavior expectations contract and $150 deposit is due by 10/31 if attending the 5/26-5/29 trip.
Katie Fieldsend: KFieldsend@cssu.org or 871-6148
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
As usual, we kicked the week off with our Reading Cafe. Students are now working independently in their Reading Response Notebooks, updating book lists, tier 2 words, and reflecting on their reading practices. A reminder to encourage your student to read - share a favorite book that you read in middle school or visit the libary this weekend.
We also watched the 10 minute CNN Student News on Monday, making up titles for each of the news stories.
We introduced two online learning tools that we will be using throughout the school year. The first is called - No Red Ink. These are online assignments that support writing and grammar skills. Students will have a weekly assignment posted on this site that will be due every Friday.
The second is Typing Club. Students have online access to this keyboard skill building site. They will be expected to practice on a regular basis. Once we have all the students up on the site, weekly assignments will be posted. We will also be introducing the students to Kidblog in the coming weeks and building the community writing forum into our regular writing practices.
These sites are set up with teacher accounts that the student accounts are connected to. If you have any questions about these sites, please do not hesitate to contact me.
We also continued our argument writing work this week. We took a look at another controversial school rule (taking recess away for bad behavior) and practiced our debate skills using a new debate format. Students then learned highlighting and underlining strategies and put them to use in creating an outline for an argument essay.
Students put the finishing touches on their posters for the Candidate Forum. The posters are amazing and will look fantastic in the auditorium, dining room, and around the building. Be sure to tune in to Channel 17 RETN to watch the WCS Candidate Forum or watch online. It will be broadcast several times throughout the campaign season.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5
Students are working hard on building proficiency in Multiplication Strategies learned in the unit. We have reviewed them in class and as you can see, they keep getting reinforced in homework. We spent the latter part of the week connecting multiplication to division and finding that the rectangular area model works well for division too. Please note that we are working towards a final assessment before the 4 day long weekend. Students have received important handouts for review and they will have the opportunity to practice problems represented on the test.
Math 6
We are moving towards the end of the Prime Time unit, and as we do so, we are pulling all of our learning together! Students began the week looking at math reflections. How do we reflect on our math thinking? We looked at benchmark pieces, created by many students in the class, that were exemplary and showed how a math thinker explains using evidence and examples. We then Skyped a photographer in Oregon to learn more about photographing patterns in nature and then spent a few days working on our Special Number Projects. The stories are great and getting better as students apply feedback from me and eventually others! The latter part of the week offered new learning in the Distributive Property and Order of Operations! Final test next Tuesday!
Science ⅚
We have spent our week analyzing the results of our green roof engineering design challenge and talking a lot about how science and engineers use mathematics to make scientific claims and to improve designed solutions to problems. It has been a schlog! As you can imagine, students aren’t wildly enthusiastic about tables and graphs, but the reality is...they are really important in science! We have been learning about the elements of good graphs and about how to deal with multiple sets of data overlapped on one piece of graph paper. With this acute attention to the math behind the science, we have discovered some interesting things about green roofs, but also about the role of plants on Earth. Writing a claim with evidence is a tough skill but one that will serve our young scientists. To end the week, we wrote a letter to our Director of Maintenance to encourage the creation of a green roof on our building (just as practice for writing proposals based on personal experience and a little research). We all know that this will likely be an exercise and not a reality, but it is good practice for how to report out and encourage sustainable building design, knowing what we know about the role and importance of plants!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in Humanities has been busy! During our morning time together our students were able to work on and finalize their questions for the Candidate Forum that happened this morning! 8 of our questions were sent to the forum, but only a few were picked to be asked to the candidates. Students did a great job of integrating their knowledge of current events and candidate specific information to form some really wonderful questions for the event! As the week went on we started a punctuation study. We are focusing on proper comma use, complete sentences, and proper use of quotation marks. Students had time to practice in class through table challenges and some really fun, creative work with political cartoons!
During our afternoon time together we finished our Bill of Rights debates, which were fantastic! Students really showcased their ability to research a specific topic and form solid, strong arguments. As the week continued on, we did some reading and note-taking on the book, A Young People’s History of the United States. This is a book that focuses on telling our history through a variety of voices, therefore giving its readers a different perspective on stories they may have already heard. Our chapters focused on the making of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, and all of the events and key players leading up to the creation of these documents. Students were able to take away a greater understanding of the order of events leading up to the creation of these important documents, why these documents were created, along with understanding that every story can have a variety of perspectives depending on who is telling it. These chapters also were able to build a nice connection to our literature group focus on social justice and injustice, along with giving us a nice beginning to our study on citizenship and what it means to be a citizen of a country.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week we shored up our understanding of ratios, proportions and continued work on solving multi-step algebraic equations. We reviewed the Commutative, Distributive, Associative and Identity properties in relation to solving equations. Later on in the week, we explored the vertical, horizontal and cross product relationship between ratios in a proportion. We tried different computational strategies and then transferred those strategies to real world situations like biological sampling. We fished for tagged golden “fish” (gold painted rice) in a pond (plastic bag) in order to find the approximate number of fish in the pond. At the end of the week, we completed TWMM part 2 and we plunged into exponent laws. Growing, Growing, Growing is our next unit and it is focused on exponential relationships.
CMP7
Looking for patterns in polygons, exploring similarities and differences between parallelograms, quadrilaterals and triangles, and understanding the angles that line transversals create was the order of business for our 7th graders. Students played a rousing game of geometry jeopardy to prepare for our Shapes and Designs Unit Test. Student teams created excellent class records to record their understanding of our geometric concepts for this unit. Finally, students completed the unit test. In the next few weeks we will spend some time working with positive and negative integers.
7/8th Science:
Putting the finishing touches on our Energy through the Ecosystem Unit, students completed a discussion about the main concepts covered by our models/simulations based on Next Generation Science Standards. Critically, we found some gaps in our scientific understanding and found through discussion we were able to clarity some or our misunderstanding and grapple with such questions as “How does energy and matter move through an ecosystem?”
We paused to learn about Linnaean Classification. Students explored the taxonomic naming convention called binomial nomenclature and the levels of classification from Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, and Genus to Species. (King Phillip Cares Only For Ginger Snaps) Taking a baggy of creatures living, extinct and fictional, they created a taxonomic tree based on physical characteristics of each creature. Students started with very general kingdoms and ended up with specific genus species names. We completed the week with a “Speed Dating” science review for our unit test. (A fabulous idea blatantly borrowed from Ms. Wesnak!) Next week we begin a new unit!
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