Happy New Year!

We were so happy to see your children this morning! Such interesting things you all did these past two weeks. We trust you all had good vacations and are ready to return to some routines. With that in mind we encourage you to revisit the Chromebook charging plan your student has to make sure it is fully charged every morning. It's an easy way to start the day of learning off right.

With a new year, we've decided to try a few new things ourselves! Students have been shuffled into new rotation groups, our morning and after lunch meetings are starting a few minutes earlier, and our schedule has undergone some extreme changes. Now we are following an A/B schedule. On an A Day, your student might have math and Language Arts. On a B Day your student would have Science and Language Arts. This allows for longer core instruction and gives us dedicated personal learning time (PLT) AND project time in the afternoon. It also opens the option of partnering with anyone for projects, not just those in our rotation group. It will take a little adjustment, but we are excited for what this new schedule will allow.

Today in math we worked on ratio tables and how they fit with equivalent ratios. It was a little tricky getting back into the rhythm of things, so we took things a little slow. HOMEWORK: (Blue & Red groups) Lesson 12 practice problems.

In ELA we are dedicating the week to mini lessons focused on the three different types of writing: narrative, informative, and argumentative. Students are taking notes and practicing different elements of those types of writing. Additionally, we will begin reading novels this week. Rotations Blue and Yellow will read A Wrinkle in Time and rotations Red and Green will read The City of Ember. HOMEWORK To that end, students received a vocabulary assignment, to write a short story with the words which is due on Friday. A spelling and definition quiz will be given on Friday, too! Vocab lists attached here!

Wrinkle in Time vocab (BLUE & YELLOW)

City of Ember vocab (RED & GREEN)

During Science, rotations Green and Yellow did some vocab work regarding plastics. Then, after a brief demonstration of the power of polymers, student groups set to work testing different samples of plastics (brought in the weeks before break) to determine which types of plastic they were. We'll have some debriefing on Wednesday and Thursday. HOMEWORK (Green & Yellow) review the 3 materials posted in Google Classroom - Plastics Everywhere -materials. No notes needed.