7th Grade December Newsletter
Writing
For December students will publish their Realistic Fiction Narratives and begin their next unit of Writing about reading: from readers notebooks to companion books. In this unit students create a real-world writing product that would match the work we want them to do most while being engaging and having them craft varied informational writing about literature. To help this unit move smoothly please encourage your child to read for 30 minutes every night and log so they can use these novels to create their companion books.
ELA
In the month of December, students will be wrapping up on the unit Working with Evidence: Working Conditions then and Now. Students will then work on the concept of personal identity formation and transformation in both historical and modern societies. The module begins with an overview of what “identity” means and how it can mean different things to different people. In Unit 1, students read first-person narratives that focus on various social identifiers—from race to gender to socioeconomic status—as they begin to frame their understanding of what identity means. Students read informational text, identifying central ideas, analyzing how an author develops his or her claims, and identifying how the sections of the text interact to form those ideas. Unit 1 builds students’ background knowledge as they closely read Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw and further explore the identity transformation of the play’s main character.
Math
Knowledge of similarity is important to the development of students’ understanding of the geometry in their environment. In their immediate environment and in their studies of natural and social sciences, students frequently encounter phenomena that require familiarity with the ideas of enlargement, scale factors, area growth, indirect measurement, and other similarity-related concepts. The Problems in this Unit are designed to help students begin to accumulate the knowledge and experiences necessary to make these kinds of distinctions and to reason about scaling in geometry situations.
Social Studies
In the month of December we will be comparing and contrasting the New England Colonies, Middle Colonies and the Southern Colonies. Each region's development was directly influenced by the areas geography. As each region develops its own identify, they'll start to question authority and will ban together as Americans. We will start to take the first steps towards a revolution!
Science
In the month of December, we will begin to explore and learn about the different phases of the moon. Students will observe and record the Moon's changing appearance day and night for at least a month. They will also study several images of the Moon to discover the major surface features and generate a list of questions about the Moon that will guide further study.
Dates To Remember
12/2- 7-1 Women Working Conditions Trip
12/3-7-2 Women Working Conditions Trip
12/4-7-3 Women Working Conditions Trip
12/24-1/1/16: Winter Holiday Break