Greetings Team Falcon Families:
We are more than halfway through trimester two, if you can believe it. We will be handing your child his/her progress reports on Tuesday afternoon to bring home. Please let us know if they don’t make their way home with your child. Here’s a look at your child’s experience this past week on Team Falcon.
Humanities: Continuing our work from last week, students spent a significant amount of time pulling key details out of both primary and secondary sources to better understand antebellum United States. We paid particular attention to the multiple perspectives of the delegates during the Constitutional Convention as they debated the future of slavery in our country. Students also had an opportunity to examine the role of spirituals, songs, and hymns as a means of communication among enslaved people in the 1700s-1800s. From the language arts lens, we continued our work with using root words, prefixes, and suffixes to determine the meaning of new words. On Monday, we will spend some time discussing today’s peaceful transfer of power to President Trump, using excerpts of the inauguration footage to guide our discussion. The rest of the week will see us discussing the abolition movement and the proslavery response and getting us to the beginning of the Civil War.
Science: Students were busy this week with testing designs, conducting experiments, and helping each other. This was the last chance students will have to collect data in class. On a case by case basis some students will need to be collecting data next week and some students have already spoken with me about this. Students should come to class next week with their data collected in order to analyze it through graphing and a written analysis. Students were given a preview of this next step by looking at an example graph from a past SEF, identifying key evidence from it, and reading a data analysis of the graph. This assignment is due on Tuesday, 1/24. Students have also been keeping a close eye on the brook trout and noted that some have hatched, although this is on the very early side. Some students learned the tests for measuring water chemistry and have been recording this data.
Grade 6
Math: Students spent the week working on fraction addition and subtraction, as well as a learning how to change fractions to decimals and decimals to percents. Students practiced using the traditional method of long division in order to do these conversions. This coming week we will focus on finding percent of number.
You can encourage your child to practice the traditional method of long division at home by giving them a few problems like 834 3 = ____. They have learned the mnemonic device of Does () McDonald’s (x) Sell (-) Cheese (✔) Burgers (↓) to remember the steps for long division. Your child should be able to explain this process. We will spend much more time on this in the next unit.
Grade 7
Math: Students are continuing to work on the integer unit. Students are learning to subtract positive and negative numbers using a number line. They have discovered that subtracting a negative number is like adding the opposite. They are reading number sentences like this 8 - (-5)= as “positive eight add the opposite of a negative five equals thirteen”. We are also continuing to review fraction addition and subtraction with mixed numbers.
Please continue to encourage your child to practice their fractions skills at home using Khan Academy. If they log into Khan Academy using their school gmail account (mymtsd-vt.org) they are already enrolled in my class.
Grade 8
Math: Students spent the first part of the week reviewing congruence and what they know about the measure of the sum of angles in straight lines/ straight angle (180°) and triangles to find missing angle measures. Students started their summative assessment on Wednesday and completed it on Thursday. This coming week we will explore the Pythagorean Theorem and similarity.
Personalized Learning: Students were introduced to their personal learning projects. After some guided brainstorming, most have zeroed in on a topic of interest and took stock of what they already know about that topic and what they’d like to learn. Next, we’ll help craft an inquiry question based on their topic and then begin to guide the research.
Bright ideas: Team Falcon uses the term “Whole Body Listening” to explicitly teach our students what listening looks and feels like.
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