6th Grade Weekly Newsletter
8/30 - 9/10
Character Strong Recognition
House Kickball Tournament
6th Grade Transition Night (repeat)
Clarification on Backpack Items (repeat)
- Water Bottle
- Earbuds (preferably non-wireless/no Bluetooth)
- Charged Chromebook
- Something to write with (pencils or pens)
- Assorted highlighters
Student Concerns/Request for Counselor (repeat)
Information from the 6th Grade Team
ELA
This week, students reviewed and practiced the main Parts of Speech: Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Verbs, and Adverbs. We took notes on Tuesday this week and students started their first independent practice on NoRedInk on Thursday this week. If students were not able to finish in class on Thursday or today in FPC, this assignment will be homework for the weekend. It will be due on Sunday, September 12th. To help students out at home (since they won't have their notebooks), I have posted our notes on Google Classroom as well as post some fun School of Rock Grammar Songs.
Next week, we will be going over the next Parts of Speech: Articles, Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections. Students will be assigned another NoRedInk practice and hopefully, we will have fun with a station activity to master the difference between parts of speech and identify them correctly in a sentence.
As always, please encourage your student to keep reading at least 20 minutes a day! We try our best as teachers to encourage this habit if students have free time during the school day, but middle school gets busy with assignments to work on and incentives for LiveSchool. It will help students reach their weekly reading goals and, hopefully, make progress on their 1st Quarter Reading Journal that we update weekly.
Science
Next week we will measure temperature. We also will be completing our first station lab. In each unit, we complete a station lab that consists of various stations to reinforce our learning. I take this grade as an assessment grade, so it will be our first assessment grade of the year. Also, we are nearing the end of our metrics unit and will be preparing for a test in the upcoming weeks. Please be on the lookout for study materials around the week of the 20th.
Math
Good afternoon from 6th-grade math!!! I hope everyone has had a good week. This is a lengthy entry in the newsletter and I apologize in advance. I did want to remind everyone that we do have Academic Lab available after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays to help with the math we are doing in class. There will be peer tutors and teachers available for assistance, so if this is something you are interested in, please sign your child up with this link.
I am going to separate this information into two groups, so please make sure to look for the class hour and read the information before.
2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th Hours
This past week we have begun delving into the world of decimals with adding, subtracting, and multiplying decimals. We will continue our decimal journey next week by dividing decimals while spiraling in some more of the other operations and then move on to multiplying fractions (Yeah!!!). Homework will be assigned every Monday and Wednesday and will be in google classroom under the Topic 1 heading. I sent a video earlier this week with the tools available for help on Savvas Math XL practice, I am providing the here, but it is also up on google classroom under the useful materials heading for students.
1st and 5th Hours
This past week, we began our self-paced lessons for Topic 1-Use Positive Rational Numbers. Please remind your student to bring earbuds to watch the videos they will take notes over, before meeting with me to discuss. The feedback I have received from students is positive, but I will continue to monitor this to see if changes need to be made. I emailed the explanation of the program to parents this week, but I also wanted to attach it here in case it did not reach you. Reminder if a student is falling beyond in their pacing I will email you and Academic Lab could be an option for students to catch up. I have put in all the assignments in SIS student and parent portal so you will be able to track progress at home.
All Classes
If you have any questions, please send me an email. I am more than happy to help. It has been a great week and I look forward to the next couple of weeks on our learning journey in math.
Social Studies
It has been a great first 2 weeks of school! This last week in social studies we are continuing our unit in Intro to Geography. We have been learning about the 5 themes of geography, latitude, and longitude. This week we will continue to see how the physical and human characteristics of places and regions connect to human identities and culture. This next week we will be focusing on continents and oceans, physical geography, and human geography. We will be working our way to discussion about government and economies.
The best way to help your student will be to check our google classroom if your student is ever absent. Under the classwork tab, I organize all of our work by the day's date. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me at my email.
Specials
PE
We finished up our beginning-of-year fitness testing and are starting our Football and Volleyball units. These will continue for the next two weeks, with Fitness Days and Cardio Days mixed in.
Choir
If you have any questions or concerns, please email our new Vocal Music Teacher Laura Harris at harrisl@platteco.k12.mo.us.
Band
If you have any questions or concerns, please email our new Instrumental Music Teacher Mackenzie Brazier at brazierm@platteco.k12.mo.us.
Art
6th Grade is learning about the difference between legal and illegal graffiti. Afterward, students will discuss the Elements of Art (Line, Shape, Color, Texture, Space, Form) and incorporate them into their Graffiti sketches.
World Language
Students have just completed their introduction to the language and culture unit. We learned about what culture is and why we study it, the benefits of learning a foreign language, and even got to have some fun creating our own unique languages! We have started our first of three language studies: Chinese. Students will study Chinese culture, learn to have a basic conversation, count to 10, and identify colors.
Computer Literacy
Students have been working on creating autobiographies using Animoto to show their learning about manipulating files (saving, retrieving, naming, etc.) in Windows, Google Drive, and Gmail. As soon as we finish and share, students will take a quick assessment and move on to a deeper dive into Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets.
PLTW - Flight and Space
Hello, I am Jennifer Morelock and your 6th grader might have me for Flight and Space! If they don't have me this quarter they probably will at some point throughout the year. So far this year we have made candy parachutes and designed paper gliders to work on our collaboration skills. We are now starting on the forces of flight including Newton's Laws, lift, thrust, drag, and weight. This is a new course for 6th graders in Platte County and I've really enjoyed teaching it, I think the kids are enjoying it too!
Reading 180
If you have any questions or concerns, please email our new Reading Specialist Tanya Fleming at flemingt@platteco.k12.mo.us.
Important Dates to Remember
September 15: PLC Day - Students are released at 12:50 pm (2 hours early)