News from 7-N

7N Blog Update

Academic Literacy with Mrs. Mahan

In Mrs. Mahan’s class, we just took a quiz on Inferring and Annotation. The kids did really well! J We are starting up a unit on Point of View and Author’s Purpose in non-fiction next. We’ll look at author’s opinion and how to identify what the author is trying to communicate in various texts.

English with Miss Wachter (Mrs. Ross)

In English, another unit is coming to a close. Students will be finishing up with suffixes and taking the final word morphology quiz! The next unit students will be learning about the elements that make a story and reading many short stories in class. The current book assignment has the students comparing and contrasting two mystery/suspense short stories and writing an informative writing piece. This is due January 10th.

Math with Mr. Josuweit

We’ve been working with fractions for the past two weeks and we will continue to work with them for a little bit longer. Fractions are something that we all use in our daily lives so I’m looking forward to showing the students exactly how they can do that. Fractions will take us up until the middle of December when we will switch over to equations.

Math with Mr. Dansberry

Hopefully the talk around the dinner table about fractions has been positive, because the students have been doing very well with fractions operations.  Alas, all good things must come to an end, so we will be wrapping up fractions on Thursday, December 5th and starting the review process the next day in preparation for the test on fractions on Thursday, December 12th.  After fractions, we will start our unit on expressions and equations.  I know that some students really loved (and others loathed) hands-on equations, but we no longer work with them here at the junior high.  I will try to tap into the students' knowledge of them to help connect prior learning to new learning.  As you can see, we have a jam-packed fourteen days before our next break.  We are certainly going to make the most of those days.  Have a great holiday season!

Social Studies with Mr. Whiteford

Before the Thanksgiving break, we finished our first unit of the year, Geography.  In this unit, we discussed the 5 themes, parts of a map, landforms and bodies of water, and finished with culture.  Our discussion of culture ended with a project that students completed with a partner.  For this project, the students compared elements of culture in the United States with those of a foreign country.  Some of the things that students looked at were food, clothing, customs and education.  Students conducted research online and presented their information in a Google slideshow.  Instead of having students come up and present their slideshows to the class one-by-one, we did a “gallery walk” where students went around the room with their partners to view different slideshows and write down interesting information they learned.  Afterwards, they completed a reflection in which they rated how well they thought they and their partners worked on the project and wrote down anything they thought they could have done better.   

Our next unit will be about Explorers.  In class today (Tuesday, December 4th), we started discussing what caused people in Europe to want to explore new lands.  Before the end of the calendar year, expect your student to come home discussing their Explorer Project!

Science with Miss Taylor and Mr. Josuweit

Before Thanksgiving break, we finished our unit on atoms, which was our first chemistry unit of the year.  The students are getting a better idea of the rigor and pace of the course now, in addition to the increased workload and required vocabulary.  They are continuing to enjoy all of the crazy science songs.  We are currently starting our final chemistry unit, Matter.  There are three lessons in this unit: Classification, properties, and changes.  We will finish up this unit before Holiday break and be ready to start physics when we return!