Humanities Update (5/14)

Hello Families of House C Students:

While it may not be Friday, it's never too late to give an update of the week in humanities...

This week's primary focus was debates. Students worked in their debate teams to finalize their preparation. We held our debates on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Students did some terrific work debating in front of their peers. We were quite impressed! While teams debated, the rest of the students served as our audience. They practiced tracing a debate and identified who they thought "won" the debate. On Monday, we'll reveal those 'winners.'

We worked on some grammar fundamentals on Tuesday: 6th graders worked on apostrophes while 7/8th graders worked on proper comma usage. We will re-visit these topics in the coming days to make sure the concepts stick.

Argument writing made up most of the rest of our week. We worked on making our claims more precise and engaging, and we introduced the concept of a context. Argument writing will be the focus of our coming week - we will build our arguments daily by writing and revising in class. This may result in homework this week if students don't finish the writing in class.

Students also got introduced to the summer reading plan for Milton Middle School. This year, students could pick their own book to read from a selection of four books. We placed an order for those books and will deliver them to students closer to the end of the year, along with some expectations and ideas about summer reading. The book students chose will be used at the start of next year to help create our school culture and give us common texts to discuss!

Ongoing work:

There was yet another weekly check on our United States geography and capital naming. We heard many students express excitement over their progress towards their goal. Links to practice are on Google Classroom.

Independent book projects and blog posts are due in 16 days. Students who had turned in an early version received feedback on their work. This feedback is meant to help students take their work to the next level. We encourage students to review the feedback and revise their work! Again, links for this assignment are on Google Classroom.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We hope you have a great weekend.