Monthly Updates- September
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ELA
6th grade
- "The Lightning Thief" by Rick Riordan
- Students will continue to build on their understanding of point of view, inferencing, citing textual evidence, and identifying elements of the hero's journey.
7th Grade:
- The students will be learning about the Southern Sudanese War during the first module.
- They will be reading the novel A Long Walk To Water.
- They will be reading for the gist, inferring about characters, analyzing and discussing point of view, gathering evidence, and building background knowledge.
8th Grade:
- The students will be learning about the Vietnam War during the first module.
- They will be reading the novel Inside Out & Back Again.
- They will be making inferences, analyzing characters, close reading, writing paragraphs using evidence, building background knowledge, and analyzing the development of the plot.
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Science
6th Grade:
- In Science, we are diving into matter and atoms. We’ve started by identifying different types of matter around us and showing what we know about atoms and their properties. Next, we’ll be exploring how heat affects the motion of atoms and what happens during phase changes.
- One of the highlights coming up is an investigation with shaving cream, where we’ll discover how some everyday objects can actually be classified as more than one state of matter—solid, liquid, or gas. These hands-on activities will help us build a deeper understanding of how matter behaves when it changes phases.
- We’ll wrap up the unit with an assessment on phase changes to show what we’ve learned.
7th Grade:
- Students are working through our Physics unit, focusing on ‘Forces & Motion’. In this unit, we will be learning to describe an object’s motion and use models to illustrate the effects of balanced and unbalanced forces on an object (including some fun physics challenge games!).
- Students will then learn to analyze and interpret graphs in order to show a change in distance and position across time, for both constant speed and variable motion scenarios. We will have a number of hands-on opportunities to investigate and explore these concepts using real world materials and activities.
- We will finish ‘Forces & Motion” with an end of Unit Test at the end of September.
8th Grade:
- This quarter our 8th graders are chemists! Specifically, they are studying the interactions of matter. This is our longest unit in 8th grade Science, and it will continue throughout the 1st quarter.
- Students will begin by learning to classify changes in matter as physical or chemical, and thus identifying what type of changes may result from a chemical reaction. We will then determine how various properties of elements have been used to produce the current model of the Periodic Table of Elements, and use the Periodic Table to model the structure of specific atoms.
- At the end of the month, and moving into October, students will practice classifying matter as elements, compounds, and mixtures, and learn to model how atoms are rearranged during chemical reactions in order follow the Law of Conservation of Mass.
- The first Science NC Check-In will take place the last week of October.
