6th Grade Learning Previews - Sept. 2018
Math: Ms. Alexandra Spencer
[email protected]
Scholars will spend the first week engaging in community building activities and learning about classroom procedures. In the second week they will be participating in the Week of Inspirational Math, a program designed by Stanford researcher and educator Jo Boaler. Ask your child to tell you what “The Four Fours” is all about and maybe you could try it with them! Scholars will learn all about growth mindset and work as teams to work on problem-solving tasks and challenges.
Later this month we will kick off our year with geometry where scholars will engage in a variety of learning experiences to help them understand area, surface area, and volume! Don’t hesitate to encourage your scholar to come get extra help from me whenever it is needed!
Social Studies: Ms. Saillant
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Our 6th grade social studies scholars will complete their first week by working collaboratively on what it takes to build a learning community. From building balloon towers to deciding who gets to survive on a new planet, students will identify team building strategies like building consensus as essential to their work in our class.
Next we will begin our geography unit, which we will study for about 6-7 weeks. The essential questions for the unit are:
Why does “where” matter? How does geography help me understand the world?
Their homework will consist of weekly news articles accessed on their google where students will identify the central idea of the source, location of news event and how it connects it to them.
Science: Mr. Nerboso
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The essential questions for these first few weeks are:
What will middle school be like? What is a learning community and how do we build one? How can growth mindset help me be a better student? We will focus on how making mistakes is an essential part of the learning process for students as well as scientists. Science class routines and procedures will be learned and practiced by your budding scientist during the first weeks of school. Our success as a learning community hinges upon the mastery of this foundation. Students will get to know each other through a series of activities designed to help us get comfortable with sharing in class. Ask your student what they choose to share.
English Language Arts: Dan Tobin, aka Mr. Tobin
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After a week of learning classroom procedures and starting to build our classroom community, we’ll start to dip our toes into the big four areas of ELA:
Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening. After some on-demand introductory writing, we’ll shift into thinking about how to choose and abandon books, plus how to track our reading. Then we’ll read! Have your student tell you about their book, and give a review. Most of the homework this year will be reading, and students are expected to complete 15-25 books. Big readers should feel free to set a higher reading goals -- last year’s reading champion cracked 200!