Hi all,
So winter continues, but students are focused and learning a lot. See below for all the things happening on Fusion.
8th Grade Only: Career Unit
Career unit is in full swing - about 90% of 8th grade students have completed their career shadows. Please check in with Mr. Pless if you feel your child will need support for the career unit. Job shadows should have been completed by this Friday.
Reminder from Nurse’s Office:
Please know that if your child texts, emails or calls you from school due to illness or injury, it should be from the Health Office. The protocol is that if a child is not feeling well or is injured, he/she is sent to the Health Office. We, with your student, will decide if a call home to a parent/guardian is warranted. Please ask your student if she/he has been to see the nurse first if there is a request to be picked up. Thank-you for your help on this important matter.
Calendar
April 11 - 8th Grade Career Presentations during school hours
April 12 - Delayed Start
April 13 - 8th Grade Career Fair 5:30-6:30pm in Vivace Team Area (all team students are welcome): 8th graders are not required to attend but receive extra credit for doing so. All posters, artifacts and interactives should be present for fair.
April 24 - 28: April Break - no school
May 16 - Delayed Start
Spectrum Sleepout
Congratulations to Mr. Martin and the Spectrum Sleepout crew! They raised $5400 for the Spectrum Center through this effort.
Curriculum Updates
LA
7th - Students are currently working to complete a Holes poster project this week. Next week we will begin looking at sample companion books and start to plan out students’ papers.
8th - We are almost finished with our class novel, Chains. Next we will begin our study of the Syrian Refugee Crisis by reading the articles linked below. Students will receive an overview on the issue and have the opportunity to write about it from their own unique perspective.
Science
Trout Update: Thanks so much to the families who fed our fish over the vacation! They continue to thrive!
7th: Students are busy writing a research paper! They selected one human body condition to use as the context for establishing the claim that the human body is a system of interacting systems. They have identified 3 body systems affected by their condition, and are writing a detailed description of each system. There are multiple check points along the way to keep students on track with this paper. We devoted plenty of class time this week for writing; next week, students will be required to keep this project moving forward mostly outside of class time. The paper is due next Friday.
8th: Last week, students completed their identification of substances in a mystery mixture through multiple days of testing and observations. They submitted their final claim, supported by descriptive evidence of the substances and the chemical reactions. This week, we focused on the structure and organization of the Periodic Table of the Elements. Next week, we will explore the properties of gases.
Math:
7th: We are wrapping up our unit Comparing and Scaling next week with a unit test. We spent some extra time on percents and percent increase and decrease towards the end of this week. Our next unit will be a geometry unit on surface area and volume called Filling and Wrapping.
8th CMP: We are almost finished with the first investigation in the Butterflies, Pinwheels, and Wallpaper unit. We have been analyzing and practicing constructing reflections (flips), rotations (spin), and translations (slide). Next week, we will have a quiz to check for understanding and then move on to congruencey properties of quadrilaterals.
Algebra: We finished with the first investigation in the Butterflies, Pinwheels, and Wallpaper unit where we were analyzing and practicing constructing reflections (flips), rotations (spin), and translations (slide). Next week, will start with congruencey properties of quadrilaterals.
SS
7th: This week we began our economics unit where we have looked at basic economic principles including wants, needs, incentives, consumers, barter, and supply and demand. We also investigated different economic systems around the world, such as traditional, market, and command economies, and students selected one of these systems for the state they have created in our Sovereign State Game. Students are now acting as entrepreneurs from their states, creating an invention or business idea they will try to “sell” to their classmates. Next week we advertise our ideas and begin to trade with other states.
8th - This week we continued our conversation about working conditions by starting to look at the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. We have looked at the causes and origins of this significant movement and also investigated some of the important technology that made this Revolution possible. We finished the week with analyzing how the Industrial Revolution impacted culture, starting with massive migration to cities using maps and graphs. Next week we will continue looking at how the Industrial Revolution impacted culture - including living conditions, the idea of “leisure”, conspicuous consumption - and we will also compare working conditions of this time period with those of countries around the world today.
