Cluster 1 Newsletter

November 4, 2022

Hello Parents, Guardians, and Caregivers!

Hope you're fall is going swimmingly! If you have not returned your child’s IMAX permission slip, Monday is the last day they will be accepted. Please contact your child’s advisory teacher if you need another copy.

As always

Cluster 1 homework will be posted here daily
Please have your students get in the routine of charing their computers every night.

Yours,

Cluster One Team

English Language Arts Update

We’re reaching the end of our Inside Out and Back Again unit! We’ve nearly finished the book and will work on the final assessment next week! We focused on citing evidence to support our claims, how a character grows and changes over the course of the text, and using context clues to determine the meaning of new words. Our final assessment will be on Monday. Next week, we will be starting book clubs. Students will have a variety of texts to choose from, and will be working in small groups to discuss and analyze the book that they’ve selected.

Math Update

We are making progress through our unit on Introducing Ratios. The students enjoyed the Desmos lesson titled Pizza Maker. Students created their own pizzas and used their own creations to explore ratio concepts. We had a very fun class discussing our favorite toppings and places to get pizza in the local area. We also worked on a lesson titled Fruit Lab and discovered there are many different kinds of fruit in the world. Students explored how to generate equivalent ratios in the context of balancing fruit on scales. It was fun to figure out what fruits we had never eaten and which ones we wanted to taste. Next week we will be continuing our work in our second unit of the year: Introducing Ratios.

Here is a useful link to Family Resources that will enable families to learn about our current unit on Introducing Ratios.

Science Update

Predators and prey, mutualisms and commensalisms, ecosystems are complex! This week students worked on building a food web to show how energy travels through an ecosystem and they classified interspecies relationships as mutualism, commensalism, or parasitism. Moving forward we will be looking deeper at the relationship between predator and prey and how they can affect each other’s population.

With that in mind, science class will be held outside on Monday 11/7 (weather permitting)!

Social Studies Update

We have completed learning about excavating artifacts and how archaeologists carefully analyze their work this week. Ask your student how their cookie excavation went! A lot found it more difficult than they originally thought! Next week we’ll begin our study of early humans and prehistory. We’ll be taking a look at the challenges they faced and how they adapted (or not) to their changing environments.