Weekly Update
This week has been made up of lots of research, fractions, mixtures and solutions, and a Jamestown essay! Lots of interesting things and lots of learning!
MATH
In math this week we’ve been working on fractions, and various ways we see them. We saw them in numerical expressions, word problems, exercises, and being compared. After we figured out that fractions are actually division, we advanced to higher problems where we created algorithms, simplified our fractions in the process, and created numerical expressions with fractions from a word problem base. Math has been fraction-filled this week!
SOCIAL STUDIES
In social studies we’ve been working on our essays, answering the focus question “Why did so many Jamestown settlers die?” Mrs. Gestrich has been helping us write our essays by giving us the format to use, C.E.R.. C stands for claim, so if you claimed so many settlers died because they starved, that would be your claim. The E is to support the claim. It stands for evidence. We had to cite our evidence in texts and then quote the sentence(s) that support our claim in our essay. Lastly, the R stands for reasoning. The reasoning is what explains how our evidence supports our claim. Using this strategy, we are writing a five paragraph essay. Also, ever since our Chapter 6 projects were due, Mrs. Gestrich has been showing 2 cheesy videos per class. That’s definitely the highlight of our social studies period. Social studies has been really productive and entertaining this week!
SCIENCE
In science we’ve been working on our mixtures and solutions unit. We’ve also been reading a lot of material and learning about extracts, dissolving, and the three states of matter and how they can transform from one to another. We also started and finished a project in a whole class period. It was a scientific model to explain a phenomena. The scenario was a puddle being on the ground, freezing and evaporating in the span of 24 hours. We had to create a model in around 45 minutes explaining how the puddle froze, and how the puddle evaporated. It was tense, but everyone finished. Since this was for a grade, there was tension. But everybody learned enough in class to do well on the model, so no one was disappointed with their final product. Overall, science has been very interesting this week.
ELA
In ELA, we’ve been working hard on our wellness projects. Just to summarize what our wellness projects are about, there are 6 dimensions of wellness, and there are 6 groups working on this project. Each group was assigned a dimension, and we had to research it. Let’s zoom in to one group itself. So each group is now breaking up their topic. They’re taking the parts that make up their dimension and researching into that. For example, if you had physical wellness as your dimension, you would research on nutrition, or diet, or exercise. The parts that assemble the dimension. Then, we took our tiny topic, like nutrition, and we created open research questions, which basically means questions with large answers. For nutrition, you would maybe say “how does nutrition affect your life?” Then you would search the web, typing in your question in the search bar, and take notes and add the website link to a chart you have on google docs. A lot of things are going on in ELA, but all of these steps are leading up to a research paper. So ELA has been very research-filled this week. But it is also interesting too.
If you’re reading this weekly update, you’ve probably been noticing how complex this week has been. But let’s say it’s definitely been fun!