Social Studies: Ms. Gisel Saillant, [email protected]
We concluded our ancient Egypt unit by formulating questions and designing board games that analyzes ancient Egypt's social structure. Ask your student about their board game and what it teaches about ancient Egyptian social structure. This week students will begin a new unit on the Indus River & Hinduism. We’ll start by analyzing maps and graphs of regions of Pakistan and India and they tackle our essential question of “why does where matter?” Ask your student what is important to know about India and Pakistan’s geography and why!
ELA: Dan Tobin, aka Mr. Tobin, [email protected]
We are about halfway through
The Giver, and we’ll transition into a series of structured conversations about some of the larger questions of the novel: How does Lowry explore the topic of conformity? How does it explore the idea of a perfect world? Students will also help compare it to a short story (Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”). From there, we’ll finish the novel and finish by writing an additional chapter of the book after it ended. All of this will help get students prepared for the big task of April: MCAS. Meanwhile, students should continue reading a book of their choice independently for 30 min a night. Ask your student to explain to you what the world of The Giver is like and then ask them what they think about that kind of world!
Science: Mr. Phil Nerboso, [email protected]
Students have been looking at maps of the ocean floor and reading about a scientist (Marie Tharpe) whose new evidence (along with the evidence of others) reinvigorated Alfred Wegener’s ideas. Students modeled seafloor spreading and thought about how this might support Wegener’s Theory of Continental Drift. Students also learned how igneous rocks form during sea-floor spreading. It’s not until this point in the unit that we give students information about the tectonic plates. Coming up, we will look at a map of the plates (without me telling that’s what they are) and think about how it might connect to what they’ve learned so far about the locations of earthquakes and volcanoes, seafloor spreading, etc. After students have a chance to reflect, we will read about tectonic plates and learn the end of Wegener’s story (that his ideas were finally accepted based on the explanation that the Earth’s surface changes due to the movement of these tectonic plates). You can keep asking students how their theory of continental drift is changing and what new information they are learning about that has shifted their understanding.
Math: Ms. Alexandra Spencer, [email protected]
During the upcoming weeks students will be investigating the exciting world of algebra! We started right off the bat with solving one step equations and students were happily surprised to learn it wasn’t as scary as they may have thought! Within algebra we will also be writing, reading, and evaluating expressions in which letters stand for numbers. Ask your student to show you some of their puzzles from www.solveme.edc.org! Our work within algebra this year will serve as a strong foundation for the work they’ll be doing over the next several years in math classes. Students will also be taking their second district-designed assessment later in the month. This will give them an opportunity to review some of the previous units and get more comfortable taking an online assessment prior to the MCAS. Students will be well prepared for this from class work and should not spend extra time studying. As always, if they would like to, they are more than welcome to come before or after school for extra review!