Science
Mr. Mahoney |
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Since returning from April break, students have been working on the final unit of the year which is entitled What Makes The Weather Change. The unit connects what students have learned about energy and matter earlier in the year with how weather occurs in the atmosphere. Students begin by drawing on their everyday experiences with weather to identify the conditions they need to investigate that contribute to weather events like a sunny day or a storm. Students first consider how air at the surface of Earth is heated. Students will then create a model that explains how the air at the surface is heated through a sequence of energy transfers from the sun to the Earth’s surface, energy conversion from solar to thermal energy, and energy transfer, topics that are connected to previous units this year. It hopes to be another unit that students have a personal connection to since students experience weather phenomena daily. Ask your student what surprised them that they learned about weather and what they know now that they didn’t know before.
Social Studies
Ms. Motto |
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This month 7th Graders will be embarking on an exploration of Judaism. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the rights and responsibilities of belonging to a community. There will be a lot of connections made between the teachings of Judaism and Judaism in our modern world. Students will use what they learn to help them grapple with the year long essential question:
Why should we learn people’s stories? At the end of the unit, students will create projects that demonstrate the major ideas and beliefs of Judaism. Ask them what connections they see between what they are learning and other belief systems they have studied.
ELA
Ms. Gonzalez |
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In ELA, we begin our last chunk of the year with MCAS and reflecting on our independent reading. After this, we will begin reading and discussing S.E Hinton’s The Outsiders. Readers are expected to read the book at home as well as in class. They are allowed to read ahead with the understanding they will be rereading sections in class. In addition to their reading, they are also gathering notes on what they noticed and what they thought about it. To help your reader think about what stood out to them, ask them if they saw the following:
- Memory moments (characters having flashbacks)
- Things that happen again and again
- Words of the Wise (advice being given or personal philosophies)
- Tough questions being asked
- Aha moments (things the main character suddenly realizes)
- A character doing something unexpected
At the conclusion of our reading, students will show their understanding of the themes, conflict, settings,and characters through a group reenactment of a key scene. They will be responsible for picking out the scene, drafting a script, revising, and editing. Each student will have a role to play whether it’s a character or “a stage hand.” Our librarian, Ms. Musher will be helping us during this portion of our unit. It will be a great way to end the year!
One last note: My student teacher, Alex Mitchell, will also be leaving us after May 3rd since his Tufts program is wrapping up. I am collecting teacher supplies to help start his first year right. If you would like to contribute to this, please give the item to your child and I will add it. Thank you!
Math
Ms. Damiani |
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In Math, students are working on their last 7th grade unit - Probability and Sampling. In this unit, students understand and use the terms “event,” “sample space,” “outcome,” “chance experiment,” “probability,” “simulation,” “random,” “sample,” “random sample,” “representative sample,” “overrepresented,” “underrepresented,” and “population.” They design and use simulations to estimate probabilities of outcomes of chance experiments and understand the probability of an outcome as its long-run relative frequency. They represent sample spaces (that is, all possible outcomes of a chance experiment) in tables and tree diagrams and as lists. They calculate the number of outcomes in a given sample space to find the probability of a given event. They consider the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for obtaining a representative sample from a given population. They generate samples from a given population, e.g., by drawing numbered papers from a bag and recording the numbers, and examine the distributions of the samples, comparing these to the distribution of the population. They compare two populations by comparing samples from each population. Check out this link to get more in depth explanations of the sections of the unit, the big idea questions, and even practice problems for you to complete with your student! (Answer Key included!)
http://bit.ly/2vpLZSx