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. Ask your student what their unit rate for hopping on one foot was! 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 working on their first big project. They will be tasked with designing a spending given a salary and percentage breakdown of budgetary items. More information to come later, be on the lookout for an email in the next couple of weeks!
Science: Mr. Phil Nerboso, [email protected]
Our emerging scientists are still hard at work investigating cells and the human body. Recently, students followed a red blood cell on its journey through the circulatory system. Students are now discovering how the circulatory system interacts with the digestive and respiratory systems to supply the body with nutrients and oxygen. Students will soon be delving into the excretory, muscular/ skeletal, and nervous systems--continuously making connections between the systems. Ask your student to describe for you how blood moves around the body supplying all the cells in the body with nutrients and oxygen.
Social Studies: Ms. Saillant, [email protected]
Our social studies scholars finished their Early Humans choice project! We’ll wrap up the unit with an investigation on the biological basis of race and its social impacts. Ask your student, “Is there a biological basis to race? “What are stereotypes and how can they impact people?” Be on the lookout for our second social studies newsletter in your email. Next, students are beginning their third unit on ancient Mesopotamia and we’ll investigate the following questions: “What is a society? How does water access influence societies? How do people build power, and what did it look like?
ELA: Dan Tobin, aka Mr. Tobin, [email protected]
We are finishing Seedfolks! After a graded structured conversation (ask your student about the Socratic Circles), students will make a claim about this book and write a new literary analysis essay. From there, we’ll shift over to a couple weeks of fiction writing to close out the year. This is where we’ll get into more of the nuts and bolts of grammar, sentence structure, fluency, and other factors that contribute to great writing. All the while, we’ll continue to read independently. Let’s collaborate to make sure all sixth graders have a book in their hands at all times!