Math
Ms. Alexandra Spencer |
[email protected]
Students have just begun a unit on rates and percentages. They have been working on reasoning with real world problems and ratios and will continue to apply these ideas to rates and percentages. Challenge your student to calculate the sale price of an item while shopping or the tip while dining out! Students will be tasked with the math practice standard of making sense of problems and interpreting the impact of sale prices, tax, and shipping fees. Later in December students will be taking their first district-designed assessment. Students will be well prepared for this from in-class work and should not need to spend extra time studying.
Science
Mr. Phil Nervosa |
[email protected]
Our emerging scientists are still hard at work investigating the nature of light and how we see. We recently discovered that white light is really a mixture of all the colors in the visible portion of the light spectrum. Ask your student to describe for you how three colors (RGB) can be combined in different ways to create the millions of colors we see on our electronic devices. The last phase of our unit involves exploring the portions of the light spectrum that are invisible to our own eyes with a focus on Infrared and Ultraviolet light.
Social Studies
Ms. Saillant |
[email protected]
Our social studies scholars wrapped their Geography unit by taking virtual tours of countries they researched. Stay tuned for an end of the unit social studies newsletter that compiles student work. This week students begin the Early humans unit by learning about the work of social scientists and will hypothesize and analyze primary sources from Paleolithic times! Our essential questions for this unit are the following: What does it mean to survive in an environment? (to thrive?) How do we know what happened so long ago? What do we owe to early humans?
ELA
Dan Tobin, aka Mr. Tobin |
[email protected]
We are in the midst of writing literary analysis essays! This will be the first formal ELA essay of middle school and good practice for the writing students will continue to do, even into high school. Sixth graders are comparing a theme (what the author is trying to teach us) in Seedfolks with a theme in the book they read with their in-class book club last month. Students begin essays with an intro paragraph, then write two paragraphs explaining how the theme is conveyed in each text, and wrap it up with a conclusion. After that, we’ll shift over to a bit of fiction writing, either a new chapter to their book club book or a completely original story.