Math and Science
We have another short week, but no shortage of math to cover! On Monday, we will be wrapping up the last lesson in chapter 8. Students will learn to solve one-step inequalities and graph the results. This is very similar to solving one-step equations from chapter 7. Tuesday and Wednesday will be used for review. Task cards and a practice test should have students prepared to take their test on Thursday. Extra credit for this test can be done at the mcgraw-hill website by completing the online chapter test and bringing in evidence (note, screenshot, print out, etc). This will be available all week until Friday. Extra credit must be turned in by Monday at the latest. In science we will be reading about Darwin's voyages around the world, and the observations he made about the many animals he encountered. We will be discussing terms like natural selection and evolution, and look at ways animals have adapted over time. Students should expect a section 1 quiz later this week. English Language Arts, Reading and History We will be finishing the fictional narratives - all revised, edited, typed, proofread and printed this week. Students have truly enjoyed having this break of creative writing from all the expository writing the curriculum requires. And speaking as such, students will be practicing and writing a compare and contrast response to the facts about Athens and Sparta they read last week. Due Tuesday is the Day in the Life writing assignment. This is a paragraph practicing writing from a character's point of view: in this case, the role your child played in our role play about Ancient Athens. Grammar this week concentrates on the tricky work of subject and object pronouns. Math and Science
This week in math we will be working on data tables and graphing linear equations. Students will learn to use (x, y) coordinates to plot points and graph lines. A quiz should be expected on lessons 1-4 on Wednesday. In science we are wrapping up our lap book this week. Monday, students will work on graphing the circumferences of their eggs from previous weeks. The lap books will be due on Wednesday and will be counted as a project grade. Later in the week we will begin to learn about Darwin and evolution. This will take us through the rest of March, and into the beginning of April. English Language Arts, Reading and History Our goal this week is to finish writing, revising, editing and typing our fictional narrative. Students have reviewed the parts of a story in doing this assignment such as rising and falling action, climax and resolution. This has all been done in class and students have been really enjoying writing creatively for a nice change... We will begin the research for comparing and contrasting the ancient cities of Sparta and Athens and review the procedure for writing that kind of essay. A role play about life in Ancient Athens will be the centerpiece of history class this week. There will be a point of view writing assignment due on Friday. Students have a reading slip on Wednesday and spelling homework and spelling test on Thursday. We continue in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". Today we reviewed what a cliffhanger and a potboiler was.... English Language Arts, Reading and History
The bulk of the week will be working on the one and only fictional narrative we do all year. Students have been loving writing a creative 5 paragraph story with all the traditional story elements of characters, setting, rising and falling action, climax and resolution. We've also been practicing dialogue. We will offiially be reminding students of all the skills tested on MCAS beginning this week. This week we look at how open responses are graded, how the test looked last year and author's purpose in writing. For History, we will be demonstrating the Democracy of Ancient Athens with a debriefing assignmment due next week. Math and Science
This week in math we are wrapping up chapter 7. This chapter has focused on writing and solving addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division equations. Mental math and math properties are applied to solve for variables in the equations. We will be spending some time Tuesday and Wednesday reviewing, and students should plan for their test on Thursday. The online practice test is available until Friday for 5 extra credit points. In science this week we are finishing up our egg lab. Early in the week we will be putting our eggs into corn syrup, our last liquid, and making our observations. For the rest of the week and into next week, students will be working on a lap book lab report. This project will include all of the information gathered from the lab, as well as analysis and conclusions from each student. English Language Arts, Reading and History The short week lends itself to writing: we've got the neighborhood setting paragraph due on Tuesday and we will begin our creative writing stories later this week in class, after students have done some planning for the story at home. I'm going old school for grammar this week: by the end of the week, my goal is that everyone can identify a verb in a sentence and most students can identify which of 5 tenses the verb is. I want Raging Rhinos to be confident and correct in their understanding of basic grammar. No more random guesswork! In History, we'll discuss Greek architecture and or course, the Parthenon. We continue reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Math and Science
Welcome back! I hope you all had a fantastic February break! This week in math, students will be learning to write and solve equations. Beginning with addition and subtraction, students will learn how to read a word problem, write a matching equation using a variable, and solve the equation. To do all of this, we will be learning to use inverse operations to isolate the variables and "undo" the math on both sides of the equal sign. There will be a short quiz on Wednesday covering lessons 1, 2, and 3 of chapter 7. For the next 2 weeks students will be participating in a science lab involving eggs. Eggs are a perfect, hands-on way to explore a single cell. In partners, students will receive an egg and observe how that egg changes when placed in different liquids. Each day students will measure and record their findings on a lab recording sheet. In the end, students will draw conclusions about the cell membrane, create a graph of egg sizes, and analyze their original hypotheses. This should be a lot of fun! English Language Arts, Reading and History We'll be reviewing the parts of a story with "Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street) and practicing making conclusions and inferencing in reading. Vocabulary is due on Thursday when we will start an open response test in class that can be finished as homework. Our next writing assignment will be based on how this story is written. Students will be writing about their own neighborhoods. Details to follow on Tuesday. Grammar continues reviewing the principal parts of verbs and we venture into irregular verbs. We finish discussing the Trojan War with some follow up questions about the Iliad, Homer and a Greek map. English Language Arts, Reading and History
Learning about poetry and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance will be our main focus this week. We continue reviewing literary elements: metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, onomatapeoia, alliteration, assonance, consonance, puns and allusions . The poetry packet should be completely done in class but some students will bring the packet home on Thursday to finish the work before it is turned in on Friday. For grammar, we continue trying to understand the perfect and progressive tenses. I've got an assignment due on Tuesday to see how things are going. In History, I will be glad to begin the idea of Greek mythology and discuss the Iliad and the Odyssey. Students will be receiving their My Opinions 5 paragraph essay for their writing folders and hopefully , corrected papers for binders on Friday. Reading slips are due on Wednesday. A double reading slip will be due on the Wednesday after vacation. We continue reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We just finished the iconic graveyard scene. Math
This week in math we will be wrapping up chapter 6. Students will learn about the distributive property and how it can help break apart numbers to solve expressions more easily. They will also take their algebraic knowledge one step further and begin simplifying expressions by combining like terms. Review activities will be on Thursday and Friday, and their math test will be Monday, 2/12. This test will cover chapter 6 skills and vocabulary. Students will take their mid-year STAR math test on Wednesday. This computer based assessment will help me to analyze how well and how much students have learned so far this year, and plan our next steps. Science Science projects are due Friday. A copy of the requirements can be found here. Students will continue to learn about the body's systems this week, and how our systems work together. Students should know the levels of organization for the human body (cell, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms) and be able to share a bit of information about each level. English Language Arts, Reading and History We're practicing reading strategies with a piece about the Brooklyn Bridge, but nothing from the Treasures books like vocabulary. We worked on Theme vs. Main idea today. We're having a focus on grammar this week with some review of the 3 main verb tenses (present, past and future) with the Perfect and Progressive thrown in for fun. For this information, I find the traditional conjugation format is the best for learning the structure of the verb. Old School, I know, but I find it really helps to organize it in your head when you see the whole verb conjugated. We continue Massachusetts Book Award reading groups for fluency. Most students did improve their fluency assessment with the DIBELS test I administered last week. I am hoping to return the "My Opinions" paper by Friday to writing folders. The essays have shown some interesting thoughts and well made arguments. For History we've begun looking at how the time is arranged with the Illustrated Time Line due tomorrow. By the end of the week, I'd like to be discussing Greek mythology. Finally, we are approaching the inciting incident in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I've heard mostly positive comments about this book, despite it's challenging vocabulary and work structure and, or course, some of the hard history of pre-Civil War Missouri. But I think it's an important book dealing with universal themes of good vs. evil, growing up and what was life like in then olden days. I hope you've been having some lively discussions at the dinner table! English Language Arts, Reading, and History
No new story this week - just trying to catch up on the material we had to postpone for last week We review the vocabulary of a story in the movie "The Adventures of Tintin" and identify how to find the main idea and details of a narrative. We review how verbs work as helping verbs and introduce the present and past progressive. We review the lesson we've been working on with figurative language to prepare for our short unit of poetry next week. We begin the study of Greece with designing an Ilustrated Timeline of some of the important events of Ancient Greece. Typically, I have broken the larger project into shorter due dates but the overview of the entire assignment is to find the required dates from the textbook by Wednesday, write the dates out as a rough draft due Thursday and the completed final copy on oak tag is due on Monday. I will have the assignment paper posted in the Downloads section. We'll have our delayed notebook check on Tuesday. English Language Arts and Reading and History
We are learning the origins of the Iditarod race in "The Great Serum Race". We will be practicing sequencing main ideas and details in this Historical Fiction story. Students have vocabulary due on Thursday, when we have the Open Response test and Spelling homework p. 58 due on Friday when we have the test. Other reading skills done in class will be identifying important ideas from an informational text. Notebooks will be checked on Friday: all papers should be bound into the notebooks, completed and in order. I will be posting the notebook list in the Upload section. We'll be wrapping up Direct and Indirect Objects with an class activity as we prepare ourselves for the Verbs next week. Reading slips are due on Wednesday. We continue with Massachusetts Book award books. We’re also beginning a new novel this week which is part of our CoreStandards. We’ll be reading “Tom Sawyer” as a class activity. This book, although difficult, has traditionally been really popular because of the universal theme of growing up. I love this book and I will be throwing all my enthusiasm for Mark Twain at 12 year-olds who don’t yet know they will love it too! Besides, they will be reading the sequel “Huckleberry Finn” in 8th grade. Math Students will take their chapter 5 test on Monday of this week. As predicted last week, we had a snow day, and the test was bumped from last Friday. The remainder of the week we will be introducing and beginning work on chapter 6. The next few chapters all focus on algebra which many students tend to love. Students will learn to write expressions and solve for variables in equations. This week we will cover lessons 1-3. Students will receive their NEW MATH BOOKS for the second half of the year this week! Part 1 of their math books should remain at home and shouldn't be discarded until the end of the year. We may use the books to revisit concepts throughout the year, especially as we approach MCAS. Science Our main focus for this week is our upcoming test on Wednesday. Students must know the organelles on plant and animal cells, along with the function of each. There are many resources within their binders to study, and a plethora of activities they can use online to practice as well. Here is one that I found particularly useful. Math
This will be a short but productive week! We are finishing up chapter 5 this week by learning all about coordinate planes. Students will be responsible for knowing the 4 quadrants and the coordinate pairs that make up each. We will practice identifying the coordinates on the planes, as well as plotting our own points given a set of coordinates. On Friday we will have our test. If for some reason there is a snow day or delay this week, that test will be pushed to Monday of next week. Science In science, we will continue working to identify the structures and functions of organelles within plant and animal cells. Students are responsible for knowing organelles such as the cell membrane, cell wall, nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts, vacuole, ribosomes, lysosomes, cytoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum, and golgi bodies. They should be able to draw and/or identify these organelles and know the function of each. Study materials can be found in binders. This test will be next week, but there may be a "pop" quiz headed their way soon! English Language Arts, Reading and History I have 2 main goals this week: to use Chromebooks to publish student persuasive writing and to really work on student understanding of how to identify the main ideas and supporting details in an informational text. The sequencing /main idea test will be on Wednesday. Students have prepared for this test by identifying what the main ideas from each stage of mummification are and by writing them in order. Recognizable spelling counts and wrong information doesn't count agains the student. My suggested order of study is on the bottom of the study guide and that is to review the information, write out the information and the summary statements and then write everything out without the study guide. It will take some time, especially since most students have not taken a content open response kind of test before. Reading slips are on Wednesday. |