In Like a Lion!

Welcome to March and a fun new schedule. We reworked our mornings so that everyone gets math and ELA every day now. This also opened up the availability for some dedicated social studies time. We are very excited about this. We still have an A/B schedule, which now applies to science and social studies. As we know, change can be difficult, but we spoke with the kids about giving it their best efforts and expecting to get the hang of it by the end of next week, not right away. Be sure to chat with your kiddos about this to help with the processing if needed.

For science, we are down to the wire. Green and Yellow had their final class time to work on their solar cars today. They race on Wednesday. There is still one more PLT opportunity for them tomorrow afternoon. We are learning that time management and peer collaboration is crucial for hard deadlines. HOMEWORK: please get those tri-folds in by Friday. Thanks to those of you who've already sent them in.

Today in math, we tried our best to complete Lesson 12 so it wasn’t homework but alas, we needed more time. We learned more about PERCENTAGE and how to use a tape diagram to solve for a percent of a number. We are also getting used to using visuals to help us lay the foundation for Algebra—ratios and rates play a large part of number sense and we will need it for future reference! FYI: UNIT 3 END-OF-UNIT ASSESSMENT ON FRIDAY!

HOMEWORK (red, blue, yellow): Lesson 12 Practice Problems, (green): Lesson 14 Practice problems - choose 4

Humanities:

Yellow and Blue rotations started their new unit today on The City of Ember! Students began the unit by reading an adaptations of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Three Questions’. Students read the short story together and answered discussion questions in groups about the importance of these questions mentioned in the story. We will revisit these questions throughout the unit. The Yellow rotation started The City of Ember and Blue will begin the story tomorrow. Vocabulary was also assigned to the students and is due Friday. HOMEWORK: Vocabulary/Spelling quiz and vocabulary writing assignment due Friday.

Red and green rotations (to be hereby known as Team Salsa) began our studies of A Wrinkle in Time by looking at the different covers of the book and making claims about what the book may have to offer, after which we began to read chapter one. We also assigned vocabulary as homework today. Similar to the vocabulary for the other novel, students will need to use 10 of the words in a piece of writing that is due on Thursday, at which time they will have a spelling and definition quiz over the eight required words (Click this link for list).

We began our new social studies rotation today, hosting blue and red rotations in 6 South. Students will be creating a travelogue about a place or country outside of the USA. Today, we brainstormed what categories of information someone might need to know, see and/or experience if they were to travel someplace. These categories will be part of their travelogue in the future. For today, students have homework to research places they would be interested in traveling to and presenting information about. Students should come to class on Wednesday with 3 countries / places to choose from and why those places are of interest to them. This should take students no longer than 20-30 minutes total.