Week Two- Getting Down to Business

The "honeymoon" phase of back to school has come and gone, and now we are really getting into the swing of things. This week brought us new challenges of building up our stamina to stay on track with content and our ability to remember all of our previous learning!

Math:

We began reviewing one-step equations and had TWO quizzes this week (they are in the grade book as four separate quizzes: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and the students did a GREAT job. It was a good review that will most definitely help as we move into our more difficult standards.

Social Studies:

As always, we watched CNN Student News and took a crack at our analysis on our own this week. We used our time this week working through some map skills that will prove extremely helpful as we move forward in our geography lessons this year.

Reading:

We started back with our independent reading and the students are doing awesome with this! We also moved into non-fiction text structure, with an emphasis on cause & effect, compare & contrast, and informative structures. To help deepen our understanding, we used three different thinking maps to organize information:

Double Bubble Map-- Compare and Contrast

Multi-Flow Map-- Cause & Effect

Flow Map-- Informative & Argumentative

Science

Did you know that Earth is 4.6 BILLION years old? Yah, there's a lot of history to cover in this Earth Science class. We skipped ahead a few billion years and began analyzing the layers of the earth, what continental drift is, and the driving force behind plate tectonics. Oh, and Bill Nye gave us a solid background about the crust!

Writing

We spent some time learning the expectations and how to complete the daily writing bell ringer by working together to create awesome examples:

Media Monday- analyze a digital ad for what the true meaning is

Typo Tuesday- find the 10 typos in the paragraph and correct it

Word Work Wednesday- define, use, and apply information on words that come from the "100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know" list

Think About It Thursday: responding to open-ended questions to promote higher-level thinking

Free-Write Friday: spend between 5 and 10 minutes responding to a prompt or writing about anything that comes to mind!

In addition to our bell ringers, we began reviewing the parts of speech and how they work to create better writing! We also played a fun version of "Around the World" with nouns and adjectives... ask your Jaguar about it!

Next Week:

*We will be completing NWEA testing for both math and reading

*There will be a map skills quiz in social studies on Tuesday or Wednesday dependent on Monday's progress