Updates and announcements

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! This quarter is flying by, and we don’t even have school on Friday!

As we gear up for the end of the quarter, we remind our students that, while there are multiple assessments coming up, they are spaced out. Study guides are due on different days and tests are not scheduled on the same day. It is important for us to explicitly teach prioritizing and time management in the classroom. We will also be reminding students of the online resource, Quizlet, to help them create study tools from their study guides.

Our week in learning

This week, students will learn about the idiom “Every Cloud has a Silver Lining”. As a routine, students will have two weeks to memorize their poems. This will be a regular rotation and the recite date will be on the “Due Dates” section of the board. The last poem of the quarter, “Some Opposites”, will be recited on 9/26.

Students will review all 25 of their roots for the quarter. The study guides are going home today and will be due Thursday, 9/27. The test will be on Wednesday, 10/3.

In Literature, we will finish reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader!

In Writing and Grammar, we will continue descriptive writing with a descriptive paragraph describing an imaginary field trip. We will work through the writing process (brianstorm, pre-write, rough draft, editing/revising, and publishing), ending the week by typing the descriptive paragraphs.

This week in science, students will continue their study of chemistry by exploring patterns in the periodic table, as well as the differences between compounds and mixtures. There will be a lab on Friday to help deepen their understanding of elements, compounds and mixtures. Study guides for the unit test will be sent home on Tuesday and will be due Monday, Oct 1st. The unit test will be Thursday, October 4th.

This week in History we will finish the instruction for Unit 3: Renaissance. The unit test will be next Tuesday, October 2nd, after a review day on Monday. Next Wednesday we will have a Socratic discussion around two passages that were written during the Renaissance period. Study guides will be given out this Monday, September 24th, and are due Monday, October 1st. This week, students will learn about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, a few theorists from other Renaissance men on how to live, and lastly what the Renaissance was like in Northern Europe. There is no U.S. Geography this week. 

In math, we will continue with our new unit on Fractions. We will spend quite a while on fractions this year, as it is along unit that will go well into the second quarter. This week, we will explore the relationship between fractions and division, as well as adding and subtracting fractions. Please note that we will have frequent quizzes in math. When a “b” quiz comes home for homework, that means there will likely be a quiz the next day. This means there will be frequent, low stakes math quizzes. We will continue math groups on Wednesday, 8:00-9:15.