March 8th Grade Newsletter
Grade Level Announcements:
Please continue to check in on the progress of your student through Schoology. Encourage them to be coming into office hours each week if they need some additional support or any clarification about grades. We will have a Quarter 3 celebration in a few weeks. Students which meet the requirements outlined in the Quarter 3 contract you all signed, will be eligible to participate. If you ask your student, they should be able to communicate if they are on-track or off-track in regards to the celebration requirements. As we near the end of the year, having a charged chromebook for class each day will be crucial as there is going to be more review happening on them for each class. Thank you all for your on-going support of your student, we are so close to the end of the year, and to send them off as High school students!!
Questions to Ask your Student:
What did you find interesting about _____ class today?
Did you volunteer to share your thoughts in any class today? Which one? Why?
How can I make your day easier in the next 5 minutes?
What was the best conversation you had today?
If you could do any part of today over again, what would it be and why?
Math- Algebra
In our current unit of study, students are working on the concept of a function as a relationship between “inputs” and “outputs” in which each allowable input determines exactly one output. Students started the unit by working with relationships that are familiar from previous grades or units expressing them as functions. In the last portion of the unit students build on their knowledge of the formulas for the volume from grade 7, learning formulas for volumes of cylinders and cones. A new unit will begin the first week of March that covers the use of exponents and their various rules and properties, and then will transition into applying scientific notation to extremely large and small quantities.
Students are also continuing to work on designing and creating a business to launch to investors. Students have done research on successful businesses, planned a budget, analyzed the costs of running the business and eventually market the business to their class of investors. Each week students will have a task to explore that is related to the topics we are studying in class monday-thursday. Encourage your students, I mean entrepreneurs, to share what they are creating, and offer any support that you can!. Please take time to check-in with your students' progress, as well as their grades weekly as we are nearing the end of the year. Any little bit of support you can offer your students is helpful as they are transitioning to high school, Thank you!!
Integrated Math II
The wonderful and eclectic bunch that is our 8th grade jumpers are cruising to the end of the year in style. May will be here before we know it, which means we are beginning our final descent towards the end-of-year exams. Students need to score a 72% or higher to pass into Integrated Math III in their first year of high school! We’ll be taking a break for CMAS preparation, CMAS itself, and final content review which is all to say that the time to start studying is now! Unit 7 Exams finish up today (leap day!) and we will be revisiting quadratics in Unit 9 very shortly with an exploration of graphing form and various ways to shift and alter parabolas in a plane. Because the end of year exam is comprehensive, students should begin to develop a study plan where they can review material from throughout the year multiple nights each week while still completing all work assigned during the remainder of our regular units…expertise is needed and expected! I recommend you check your student’s grades with them in schoology and illuminate to see what they have scored on this year’s exams, especially the midterm as that will be the best predictor of how they will do on the final.
Language Arts
We are well into To Kill a Mockingbird; in this week’s chapters, Scout and Jem enter the courthouse to watch Atticus defend Tom Robinson, an exciting time in the novel. As we read, we analyze Harper Lee’s techniques in bringing her characters to life through literary devices such as dialect, diction, dialogue, and selection of detail. We have also been examining the complex narrator’s perspective of Scout, who tells the story through the eyes of a little girl, but with the wisdom of retrospect.
Simultaneously, the students are in leveled lit circle groups reading supplemental novels relating to social justice (or injustice). They have assigned chapters to read each week that are discussed in their groups most Fridays. This unit’s project will be to create a PSA raising awareness about a real incarcerated person who is either wrongly convicted or serving an unfair sentence for a minor crime. If they choose, they can present their findings at Soul Night and parents can sign petitions or donate to their cases.
Our main ask of parents this month is to encourage reading at home. We know this is extremely difficult with many 8th graders who are resistant to reading and would rather play Fortnite. However, with To Kill a Mockingbird reading in class, plus lit circle weekly assignments, it is critical that some of their A.R. reading be done at home in order to meet their Quarter 3 goals (a grade on their report card).
As always, please reach out with any questions or concerns! rachel_sommer@dpsk12.net; allison_andre@dpsk12.net.
Science
We are continuing our studies of the Physical Sciences with our fifth unit, Chemistry. In this unit, students will learn how to apply energy concepts and ideas when describing the properties and various changes of matter. We will then spend a week on review for the science CMAS right after spring break, and culminate our school year in space as we study the solar system and beyond. Classwork assignments are assigned each day and are due by the end of the week, however students should be able to complete them during class and submit them at the end. There is no assigned homework unless a student needs additional time beyond class to complete their classwork.
Social Studies
Your student is working on a project with the book “Stamped Remix”. As we read through the book 8th graders are analyzing the text for themes they chose themselves. Students are working towards creating children's books based on those chosen themes.