Cluster 2 Newsletter

Hello Parents, Guardians, and Caregivers!

If you have not returned your child’s field trip permission slip, Monday is the last day they will be accepted. Please contact your child’s advisory teacher if you need another copy.

Yours,

Cluster 2 Team

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

In English class, we just finished our first whole class novel “Inside Out and Back Again”. Please ask your child what they thought about the book! 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 the book.

Ms. Murphy ELA

This week students have been continuing their learning using the Language Live program, utilizing both Word Training and Text Training. We have been continuing learning and identifying the main idea and supporting details in short passages. We are continuing reading our whole class book, The Misadventures of Max, practicing summarizing chapters using a graphic organizer, retelling and also in written form. Students will be learning a new summarizing strategy next week. Grades will be closing November 9th so please remind your child to check Powerschool for missing work.

Here is the link for WMS ELD and Phonics

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.

In Science class, our new topic is about relationships in an ecosystem: predation, symbiosis, and competition. This week students learned about predation by constructing a giant food web to show how energy travels through an ecosystem. Next week, we investigate interspecies relationships (symbiosis) such as mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. Moving forward we will be looking deeper at the relationship between predator and prey and how they can affect each other’s population.

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.

Here is a link to the specialist Smore.