CLUSTER 3

Students will know…

• hierarchy of levels of organization (cells, tissues, organ, organ system, etc)

• characteristics of living things (made of cells, use energy, homeostasis, etc)

• how organs work together to form a system

• that the body systems are interrelated and work together to create one functioning organism

• circulatory, respiratory, digestive, excretory, muscular/skeletal, nervous

Students worked with scientific tools such as phylogenetic trees, cladograms and taxonomic keys this week in science class. As students learned the different purposes of the tools, they observed various physical traits of organisms. Students practiced using taxonomic keys (aka dichotomous keys) in order to identify organisms and found that this requires some trial and error. We noted that this old school method requires more work than using an app on the phone to identify organisms!

Hello! Next week we’ll be finishing our unit on Scaled Figures and students will be making a scaled copy of a room of their choice. We will have a unit test the week of October 11th.

Lesson 6 helps students transition from thinking about scaling using scale factor to thinking about scaling using scale. This lesson is also intended to motivate the usefulness of scales when representing very large or very small objects. Students will use scales to reason about scale drawings for the remainder of the unit.

Lesson 7 is the first lesson where students analyze scale drawings (scaled two-dimensional representations of actual objects or places). They learn that scale and scale drawings can be used to find actual lengths and areas, which can help them solve real-world problems.

Lesson 8 is intended to span two days in which students use different scales to create their own scale drawings and consider the impact that scale has on the size of the final drawing.

Lesson 9 continues exploring different scale drawings of the same object. Students calculate specific distances on one drawing based on another, determine the scale of a drawing, and justify whether two different scales are equivalent.Lesson 10 is a two-day task where students practice choosing an appropriate scale for a scale drawing and creating a drawing using that scale as they redesign a room.

Learning Targets:

- I can identify important physical features of Monsoon Asia

- I can interpret different thematic maps

We have finished our introductory unit on historical thinking skills. Your children are now officially historians! :-) They should be able to make inferences based on observations, ask good questions (both open and closed), look for multiple causes of events, and be able to identify and use multiple types of sources. They can also test claims with intuition, logic, evidence, and authority. This week we shifted to the geography of Monsoon Asia. Students are working with thematic maps to identify characteristics of the region, including climate, vegetation, population, and more. We will then focus on ancient India in the coming weeks.

Learning Targets:

• I can peer edit another's work and give kind, specific and helpful feedback to improve their writing.
• I can use feedback from a peer to revise my writing to meet specific objectives
• I can write a poem modeled after a mentor text in the style, format and with similar content as the exemplar poem.

Students in ELA will be finishing up, peer editing, revising (with several focused skill lessons), and polishing their Where I am From poems this week. We will showcase the poems in a gallery walk where students will practice giving kind, specific and helpful feedback to each other. Our next unit will be a new short story unit. Classes will be using mentor texts to review reading strategies, literary terms, and guided instructional practices that will be implemented with longer novels later on in the year.