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Social Studies with Mr. Bird and Ms. Ferguson: This week in Social Studies the students began their unit on Native Americans! Each day the students learned about Native Americans from different regions across the U.S. including the Southwest Native Americans and Plains Native Americans. The students concluded this week with a short quiz relating to the topic! If your child needs to locate the readings for this week they can find it in Google Classroom under the “Classwork” tab in the “Native Americans” section! Next week we will be continuing our discussion on Native Americans from different regions of the United States with another short quiz to end the week. The unit test for Native Americans will be during the week of August 31st if everything continues to go as planned! Science with Ms. Diaz and Mr. Dougherty In the last three weeks we’ve gone over the Scientific Method, understanding the meaning and importance of each step. This week, we honed our distance learning skills by practicing submitting assignments in Google classroom, taking quizzes, making a slideshow and playing Kahoot. Three weeks and 3 quizzes down, putting us that much closer to the long awaited Labor Day weekend! Next week we will begin our first hand-on activities, exploring the ties between music and science. Math with Mrs. Zuniga *All students will be taking the first UC Davis test next week. Varsity: Students took their second quiz this week on addition and subtraction word problems. Students are moving smoothly through our first unit and are ready to start our section on multiplication. I did let students know that their multiplication facts MUST be memorized, to help them better understand more difficult math concepts. Scholastic: Students spent this week reviewing place value as well as going back to review multiplication and division with multi-digit numbers. Students will be taking their first unit test next week on Friday. We are finishing up our unit with rounding, comparing whole numbers, and powers of ten. Honors: The students are working hard to remember the lessons from last year that we are reviewing at the moment. The students took their first quiz last week and did very well. The class is working on order of operations and algebraic expressions this week. Next week we will continue solving algebraic expressions and take our second quiz. Math with Mrs. Nijjar *All students will be taking the first UC Davis test on Thursday (8/27/2020). We spent these three weeks exploring math integrated technology and finding the best fit. Students have done an amazing job adjusting to distance learning along with getting to know their peers. Varsity: Students learned about adding, subtracting, and multiplying multi-digit whole numbers. They put great efforts to take a quiz and show amazing results. In the coming weeks, students will be learning about dividing multi-digit whole numbers. Scholastic: Students spent this week learning about properties of addition and multiplication, and multiplying/dividing multi-digit whole numbers. In the coming weeks, students will be learning more about place value, rounding, and comparing whole numbers. Honors: Students learned about adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing integers along with solving algebraic equations. In the coming weeks, students will be learning about exponents, PEMDAS, and algebraic word problems. Language Arts with Mr. Harding This year’s Pentathlon topic is the Cold War. It has been somewhat refreshing to go back into history and see our greatest fears still not realized. As we read about the organizations and the individual spies that changed and maintained the balance of superpowers, we are learning how fear is generated and how it affects people. This week, we studied Cold War era propaganda from both superpowers and noticed themes. We may have a project in the near future where the students must create propaganda to promote an agenda. Language Arts with Ms. Rodieck The big question this week was “How do writers use descriptive language to help their readers SEE the story?” This week we continued reading our novel Spies and learned about Elizabeth Bentley, an American who was a Societ Spy. We also worked on revising our Summer Shorts stories and adding descriptive details and reviewed adjectives. We continued to work on our computer skills while we learned (or reviewed) Subjects and Predicates. Next week, Honors and Scholastic will start diagramming. Students will need to have 3-5 cards or a 3-5 spiral bound notebook like the picture. You can even use binder paper or blank paper and cut it into ¼ sheets. We will be using these to draw out the diagrams and then show them on screen. Having a notebook will keep their work together and organized. Sally Girl helped me with some pictures of what an engaged on-line learner looks like.. Here, Sally is laying on her back, not even looking at the screen. She obviously is not not engaged with the lesson. In this second picture, she is looking at her screen, engaged and listening to the lesson, ready to do what she needs to do next. |