Math: Ms. Alex Spencer – [email protected]
During the first week of school we will be participating in activities to help us learn classroom procedures, form expectations, and create classroom community guidelines. In our first unit, students will be engaging with number theory. Specifically we will be looking at positive and negative numbers, factors, multiples, primes, composites, and prime factorization. Do you know if 1,089,593,560,325 is divisible by 9 using mental math? Ask your child to teach you a quick trick! Scholars can expect to have homework 3-4 nights per week and should not be spending more than 30 minutes per night. Throughout this unit and over the course of the year students will be engaged in independent and group tasks, reflection activities, quizzes, tests, and projects. Scholars will be asked to reflect at the end of each unit on their areas of strength and growth and will be provided with opportunities for feedback. Don’t hesitate to encourage your scholar to come get extra help from me whenever it is needed!
Social Studies: Ms. Gisel Saillant – [email protected]
Our 6th grade social studies scholars will complete their first week by working collaboratively on what it takes to build in 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. Phil Nerboso – [email protected]
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? Our main focus will be on how making mistakes is an essential part of the learning process for students and scientists. Science class routines and procedures will be learned by your budding scientist during the first weeks of school. Our success as a learning community hinges upon the mastery of this foundation. We will focus on practicing routines and procedures while we get to know each other better during the first weeks. Students will begin an in class mini-project called “All About Me - Index Card Tower.” Ask your student about what they choose to share about themselves. Or about which goals they set for themselves for science class this year.
English Language Arts: Dan Tobin, aka Mr. Tobin – [email protected]
After a week of learning classroom procedures and playing team-building games, we will write an introductory narrative. Then it’s time to launch our reading workshop for the year. We’ll learn how to choose and abandon books, plus how to track our reading. Then we’ll read books! Have your student tell you about his or her book, and give a review. In addition to other ELA homework, students are expected to read two hours a week, completing 15-25 books this year. Big readers should feel free to set a higher reading goals for themselves -- last year, a few sixth graders reported having read more than 100 books!