Cluster 1 Newsletter
For the upcoming week 9/20-9/24
Dear Parents and Caregivers,
We hope you're having a great start to the school year, we know we are! This newsletter will contain updates from all cluster teachers on what we're learning for the current and upcoming week. We're looking forward to seeing you at Back to School Night on Thursday, September 23.
To see pictures of what we're doing in class, please follow our Instagram: WMSCluster1
Most Sincerely,
Cluster 1 Team
ELA
ELA students have been working hard on their My One Word (aka Word of the Year) projects in order to set goals and action steps that will promote their growth as learners and human beings. Our students want to become more Brave, Creative, Kind, Confident and Hard-working to name just a few. Ask your child to view their Padlet explaining their word and why they chose it!
Starting next week we’ll begin our discussion of the Notice and Note Signposts for fiction. This strategy is used in all grade levels at the middle school and promotes comprehension and robust classroom discussions of our novels. Feel free to check out the link or attached image to get a sense of what the 6 signposts are. I promise you’ll start seeing them everywhere in the books you read and shows you watch!
Math
Math started this week with students learning how to convince and justify like mathematicians. Then we started the first unit (geometry) with a pre-assessment. Students have been spending the past couple of days coming up with and practicing different strategies for finding the area of irregular shapes.
Next week, students will continue working with parallelograms and triangles. They will work on finding the base and height and formalize the strategies they came up with into formulas.
Science
Social Studies
During our first full week of school Social Studies students learned about the events of 9/11 and why it’s an important event in American history. We also perfected our understanding of the locations of the world’s 7 continents and 5 oceans. Quiz retakes for the Continents and Oceans quiz will be on Monday 9/20.
Next week in Social Studies we’ll be starting our long term Globe project! This project will help to bring together our new learning of longitude and latitude lines as well as our knowledge of the world’s continents and oceans. We will also continue our study of current events through our Fantasy Geopolitics draft in which students choose countries that are mentioned in the news and score points based on that country’s actions.