Weekly Update 11/15

Happy week before Thanksgiving break!

Announcements:

The end of the trimester is Friday.  This means teachers will no longer be accepting assignments after Friday, so that grading can be finished and report cards created.  

Student led Conferences will continue this evening (Wednesday) for grade 6. If you have not signed up, you can write to sendres@mymtsd-vt.org to make arrangements for the available time slots.

Social Studies:  This week students are continuing to work on their "google slides" presentations on an explorer from the European "Age of Exploration".  We are hoping that they will have them ready to present to you at the student led conferences this week.  By the end of the week, students will practice their presentation skills by going through "round robin" presentations.  This will allow each student to present a minimum of three times to small groups.  They will receive peer feedback after each presentation allowing them to make improvements.

Literacy: Students should be reading a minimum of 20 minutes.  Their literacy storyboard final draft is due.  

Language Arts students have their final assessment of the trimester, a writing piece on Columbus that will be assigned Tuesday and is due by Friday.  This is an in-class only assignment.  

Have a great week!

Team Independence

This Week, 11/6-11/10

Hello, Families!

Announcements:

• Thanksgiving Pie Sale forms were given to students on Friday 11/3, which can be found in their Language Arts binders or in backpacks.  This is a fundraiser for students to begin to accumulate money in their student accounts to be financially ready for their trip to Boston in grade 8.

• Please make sure to return your time preferences for the upcoming Student Led Conferences which will be held on November 14 and 15.  This is done on a first come, first serve sign up.....so please get them in ASAP.  

• The book fair is in the Elementary Library this week.

Social Studies:  Students are researching about the motivations and accomplishments of many different explorers during Europe's "Age of Exploration".  We will work on skills of how to extract information from text in our research.  By the end of the week students will have completed a chart with this information.  We will begin to focus on the positive and negative aspects of this period of exploration.  Students will also choose an explorer to create a Google Slides presentation to "introduce" the explorer.  Grades from last week's quiz will be in PowerSchool by Tuesday.

Language Arts students will be using the topic of exploration to evaluate primary and secondary sources.  This was the plan for last week, however the unexpected day off moved plans to this week. By Friday, we should be reviewing introductions and conclusions so that students can write about the explorers introduced in Social studies classes. Today, the new summer reading book cover and summary is due, these can be accepted late as the summary is part of the overall writing grade.  

In Languages, students will continue their studies of Spanish speaking countries of central America.  Spanish names for classroom objects will be reviewed and preparations for conferences are on the list to be done this week.  

In Math, students are working on rates and ratios.  Any conversation at home that involves these would be great.  Students are working on Lessons 15, 16 and 17 this week, ask your student about completion of these tasks.

Have a great first full week of November!

Team Independence

Student-led Conference Forms Coming Home!

Student-led conference forms will be coming home with your student today, Thursday, November 2. These forms will ask you to select your first and second choice of meeting times, November 14 or 15, then return the form to your child's advisory teacher.

Language Arts Summary Book Summary Due Friday

This Friday, November 3, Students are expected to turn in their new book cover design as well as the summary and recommendation portions of the project, all based on their summer reading book.