Cluster 2 Newsletter

Hello Cluster 2 Families,

Fall conferences are upon us!

Please use this link to sign up for a conference.

Conferences are on the following dates:

Thursday, October 27 from 1-3 (on Zoom)

Thursday, October 27 from 5-7 (in person)

Tuesday, November 1 from 1-3 (in person)

Tuesday, November 1 from 6-8 (on Zoom)

We look forward to discussing your child’s progress with you in the coming weeks.

Best,

Cluster Two

Here is the link for Reading Classes from Mr. Cochran, Ms. Zuckerberg, and Ms. Braese.

Here is the link for Wilson Reading with Ms. Sorenson

Ms. Conceison ELA

Our first class novel is well underway! In this novel, we are focusing on how a character develops and changes throughout a story. We are also working on gathering textual evidence to support a claim, using what the text states explicitly as well as inferences we can draw based on the evidence we have. We continue to be impressed by the thoughtfulness with which the students are approaching this text.

Some conversation starters/questions you can ask at home:

How are you liking “Inside Out and Back Again”? Why?

What are some of the struggles Ha and her family are facing? How does reading about those struggles make you feel?

What are some questions you have about the VIetnam War or what it is like to be a refugee?

What do you think about the writing style? What do you like/dislike about reading a novel in verse? How is it different from reading a traditional novel?

Ms. Murphy ELA

This week students have been continuing their learning utilizing the Language Live program. As a class we have discussed informational text features, finding main ideas and details in informational text, categorizing vocabulary words and learning how to begin to elaborate sentences. Students have started reading a whole class text, titled The Misadventures of Max Crumbly. Students are practicing summarizing chapters 1 and 2 in an organizer in Language Live Google Classroom. Please make sure your student completes filling in each organizer for each chapter.

Developing (ELD 3) Ms. Campos

Over the past week we worked on prepositional phrases and how they act to connect ideas in a story. We also read fables together working in pairs while practicing making summaries of what was read. We learned about using the past tense to convey meaning and practiced irregular verbs. For next week, we look forward to beginning work on comparing and contrasting the structure and meaning of a work of fiction across texts.

Expanding (ELD 4) Ms. Gilmartin

After giving kind, specific, and helpful feedback to their fellow poets, students are working on their second drafts of their Where I’m From poems. Next week they will explore Kwame Alexander’s poem Here’s What I Remember to practice making observations and inferences–vocabulary and skills which they use in science and social studies. By the end of next week, students will finalize their poems and publish them in Book Creator, a multimedia digital book-making tool. We hope to be able to share them with you during conferences!

This week in math we compared and contrasted the features of prisms and pyramids. We also described a polyhedron based on its number of faces and the shapes of its faces. We used paper nets made to help students understand that the word net refers to a two-dimensional figure that can be assembled into a polyhedron. Through the use of 5 stations over two class days, we learned to construct and deconstruct polyhedra with magna tiles. We used cubes to create rectangular prisms with specific surface areas and as a result students learned how to calculate the surface area of a prism or pyramid from a net on a grid and describe the strategy. We capped our week off with a unit ending assessment.

Next we will be working with equivalent fractions as we enter into our next unit: Introducing Ratios. Here is a useful link to Family Resources that will enable families to learn about our upcoming unit on Introducing Ratios.

Can you really claim that? Sixth Grade Scientists used the CER (claim, evidence, reasoning) format to convince others that their mystery substances were alive, nonliving, or dead. Evidence was based on daily observations of the substances. Ask them about it! Next, we will explore the world of ecology by doing a short research project on an endangered animal. Through this, students will learn about how an organism, and its population, community, and ecosystem are all interconnected.

We started our new unit of Archaeology this week! Students are immersing themselves in vocabulary study to help make sense of our learnings as well as investigating how archaeologists survey and excavate artifacts to help learn about the people of the past! We’ll also start writing CERs (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) paragraphs to help organize our written thoughts into coherent and thoughtful responses to a prompt.

Here is a link to the specialist Smore.