Cluster 1 Newsletter

September 28, 2023

Hello Parents, Guardians, and Caregivers!

Hello Parents, Guardians, and Caregivers!

This is our cluster newsletter! We'll send out one of these a month while we're in school together. It's a space where teachers can provide updates on their classes and where we can share information about upcoming events and important dates! Advisors will reach out soon to schedule our upcoming caregiver conferences that will be happening on October 19 and October 24.

If you missed our open house, here is the link to our digital flier: bit.ly/3LCVfde

As always, feel free to reach out to your student's advisor with any questions!

Yours,
Cluster 1 Team

English Language Arts Update

Howdy!

It's been so great getting to know your students these past few weeks. I've already seen a lot of talent and enthusiasm out of this group and I'm excited to help them grow their ELA skills even more! We started the year learning a reading strategy called Notice and Note: Signposts. Please consider checking the link for a short blog post that explains the strategy. It's super helpful and many teachers at WMS use it with their students!

Starting today, we'll begin reading our first in class novel: Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. It's the story of a Vietnamese family seeking refuge during the Vietnam War. Eventually they land in Alabama and, needless to say, they experience culture shock as they adapt to an entirely new way of living. As always, reach out if there's anything I can do to help or if there's anything you'd like me to know about your student.

Lastly, we'll be completing the first of three i-Ready diagnostics in Math and Reading next week. These assessments provide helpful insight into your learners and their skillsets. Keep in mind, this data is just one piece of the puzzle!

Thank you so much for reading and get in touch if I can help with anything!

Yours,
Mr. Allen

Math Update

Hello! Welcome to Math!

We started out the year with some growth mindset activities and kicked off the year with learning that it is OK to make mistakes in math class. We can learn from those mistakes and as a result the brain will grow and develop. This week is math we worked on describing the characteristics of polygons. We also combined everything we have been learning about finding the area of parallelograms and triangles to calculate the area of polygons that are not parallelograms and triangles. We utilized our decomposing and/or surrounding and subtracting strategies to determine the area. We capped off our week with the first quiz of the year.

For the next week or two, we will work on describing the term surface area as how many square units it takes to cover all the faces of a three-dimensional object. We will also learn how to calculate the surface area of a rectangular prism and share our strategies with one another. Here is a useful link to Family Resources which will enable families to learn about our current unit on Area and Surface Area.

Enjoy the weekend,

Ms. Palermo

Science Update

Hello!

Science is off to an exciting start! We have been working on our lab skills, starting with measuring liquid volume and quantitative and qualitative observations. We practiced our lab skills with a Rainbow Lab activity where students developed formulas for new colors. Some creations included: Mediterranean Sea Foam, Northern Lights, Rose Grape and Microwave. Ask your sixth grader to see the gallery of new colors on our Google Classroom!

Next up we will be starting our Biology Basics unit, where we will be looking at the defining qualities of life and what characteristics all living things share!

Ms. Daigneault

Social Studies Update

Hello!

We’ve had a great start to the year in Social Studies. This week we are using our studies of continents and oceans and parts of a map vocabulary to help support us as we start our Globe Project. We will spend the next days graphing latitude and longitude coordinates as we create the continents on our large maps. This will lead to further study of thematic maps and how different maps can show us all about our Earth. Look out for your child’s globe hanging in the 6th grade hallway during conferences!

As we move into next month, we will dive into our study of the ancient past. We will begin by learning how we know about the past, and the various professions related to its study. Archeology will be highlighted, as our following units have a strong connection to the field.

Ms. Lipson