World Language – To find out what’s going on in Mrs. Brown’s Spanish and French classes, please see her website at https://sites.google.com/a/sau50.org/world-language—mrs-brown/.
ART: 7th graders are working on a “Hiding in the Woods” assignment using Photoshop Elements. This digital lesson is to connect with the Harvest Festival and the great news of Rye Junior High School having imminent access to woods through the Wedgewood Project. The 7th grade artists are having a lot of fun with this assignment. Look for them on the front lobby TV in the coming weeks at at the Harvest Festival on October 26! They will also be on Artsonia, our online art gallery. If you did not register or an account last year, look for an email reminder. Thanks!
MUSIC: Students have just completed a project making their own cellphone ringtones. We used a computer music program called Mixcraft to create short original songs and converted them to mp3 files. The students have saved their ringtones to Google Drive to put on their phones at home. We are now studying soundscapes and music inspired by outer space. Please see the music website for details on our upcoming projects. www.musicatryejrhigh.weebly.com
Language Arts – Students are in the midst of writing a memoir. Classes read examples of memoirs and picked out elements that made it a successful piece of writing. We then used those elements to create our memoir assignment and rubric. Students will be incorporating descriptive language, writing an effective hook, a snapshot scene (ask what it is!), and a lesson learned from the memory they retold. We will be sharing this work digitally through the assistance of Ms. Keating, our technology coordinator. Stay tuned for more information on how you can hear the students tell their memoir to an audience!
We have begun reading our first class novel together, to model strategies astute readers incorporate as they read. The focus will be predictions, literary elements such as foreshadowing, developing a mood, character development and author’s purpose with language. As we read Stargirl, students will be collecting data from the book to defend a claim, which is preparation for our first argumentative essay.
Just a reminder, students should be reading 30 minutes, four to five times per week. There is a new Reader’s Response assignment posted on my website, due October 30. We are fortunate enough to have a wonderful library in our building, and many students have already displayed growth in their reading choices. It’s been a wonderful start to the school year!
Science – We are wrapping up a quick unit on trees as a preview for the Wedgewood Project. Each student chose a tree to study, photograph and identify using a key. We are hoping to incorporate our new 3D printer (which was funded by the REF) and print out our leaf drawings.
The students also have some digital work (The Eye) which is located in their Google Docs account and on Google Classroom. Each student will be able to post their work on a blog for a wider authentic audience later this week. The blogs will be located off of http://tinyurl.com/7thscience.
Extra credit and enrichment activities are posted in the classroom for every student. I also have Sky Calendars to take home to help you observe the night sky.
You can follow our class by going to http://twitter.com/7thscience.
Math – Students began the year working on a Geometric Art Project! They took pictures of their completed project and graded rubric and uploaded them to their Google drive account. They did a great job on their projects which are all displayed on bulletin boards both inside and outside the cafeteria. We completed our first unit on The Real Number System. The Chapter 1 tests will be returned once all students have made up the test. Your child should be able to articulate to you the different types of numbers and the difference between rational and irrational numbers. On Tuesday, students brought in a pine cone to identify the Fibonacci sequence with the number of spirals going to the left and right. They also learned other examples in which the Fibonacci sequence relates to nature. We also drew a perfect Fibonacci spiral on graph paper. Next week, we will start our second unit on Rational Number Operations which covers adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing integers, decimals, and fractions.
Just a few reminders…digital copies of all homework assignments and completed class notes are available to students in their math Google classroom. If your child forgets their math homework at school, they can print off an extra copy from Google classroom or copy the work onto separate paper. Also, homework assignments are posted on my webpage http://rjh7math.weebly.com/homework.html. Fifty math points (at least 10 gold stars from BuzzMath) are due by December 4th for Term 1. This has been a great start to the school year and I’m really enjoying getting to know your kids!
Social Studies– Classes are off to good start. We began the year by discussing the social sciences and how its disciplines view humanity from different perspectives. Next we took a look at the concept of culture, using it to compare different ways of life practiced in countries around the world. Currently the students are wrapping up a unit about the Paleolithic & Neolithic Eras. We learned how early hominids discovered five advantages that allowed them to gain the upper hand in their competition with other species. This will be followed by the revolution that turned human from food gathers into food producers. Our next unit will center on the different early river civilizations, with the students having an opportunity to be the teacher. Finally, in addition to the social studies content, we have been working on the skill of constructing well-written informational paragraphs. Students have learned the structure and been given multiple assignments to practice the skill. The next step will be the multi paragraph essay.
