In March students will gain historical background knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement and Little Rock Nine to understand key players and components of this significant time period. We will then begin our core text Warriors Don't Cry. Students will have ample opportunities to discuss the text to gain a deeper understanding of the perspectives of the characters in this memoir. Students will also be focusing on strengthening vocabulary acquisition skills and practicing writing journal entries to capture their understanding of the text.

This month, students will continue their work with systems of equations. We are looking into different real life situations such as saving money, spending money, budgeting, setting up a restaurant, winning a race etc. As we wrap up systems we will move into our next unit, where we will discover functions, what they are, and how they work. We will look into piecewise functions and explore where we see them in our lives. Some examples are "Buy 1 get 1 free" or "Tickets are $1 each, but if you buy more than 5 they are only 75 cents". Try finding some of your own situations with your family!

Now that students have established a strong understanding of the most basic rights of American Citizens, it is time to study the structures put in place to guarantee them. In this unit students will look into the purpose of government, how each branch works, and how it all comes together. Their work will culminate in an individualized project that highlights the elements of government that they found most important to guaranteeing rights.

Immersion Social Studies

Students will explore a basic challenge for every civic participant, which is to understand how the powers of government are organized and whether they successfully secure the rights of the people.

Student will entering a mini engineering design unit where they will complete two design challenges. In the first challenge, students will use biomimicry to develop an idea for a new product inspired by nature. The second challenge will focus on students using the design process steps to brainstorm ideas on how to build a wind turbine that can create enough energy to lift a cup filled with pennies.

In March, we are going back to our math reasoning routines! We are on our penultimate routine: Capturing Quantities. This routine has students identify quantities in a problem and prompts them to show their relationship by creating a diagram. I tell students "relationships" in math center around the operations (addition, subtraction, multiplicative, division, exponential etc.), and sometimes quantities can have several relationships with each other. This routine is essential for having students make sense of their math and really think about what is going on in order to solve the problem.

Students will be reading the text Warriors Don't Cry. We will use this text to continue our practice of identifying theme. We will be using CER style paragraphs to determine the central theme of the text. Students will also continue to deepen their use of connections. Students will be connecting this historical text to modern day and reflecting on how these connections can add to our analysis of a text.

During the month of January, we will begin our next unit centered around the core text The House on Mango Street. We will continue to develop our close reading skills by annotating the text and tracking repeated patterns across the text in order to understand the text's central theme. Students will learn about various literary elements such as theme, symbolism, and juxtaposition as it relates to our core text. By the end of the unit, students will create a project answering our unit's essential question: How does one’s home/community impact the individual?

This month students will be continuing their work with linear relationships. Students have worked extremely hard the past month in learning about slope, what it means and how it works. We are now stepping it up and using this knowledge to write equations, and solve equations about linear relationships. This will push us forward to our next topic of solving systems of equations.

Students will be entering a unit that is centered on their rights as American citizens and what we should do if these rights are not protected. We will spend a considerable amount of time on the Bill of Rights and the events in American history that led to the creation of these rights. All of this will be compared to students' lives in order to determine if the ideals of the founding fathers have been upheld, and whether or not our rights as citizens are being protected.

Immersion Social Studies

Students will continue the second unit which includes the Bill of Rights and how the grievances led toward to the Declaration of Independence.

Students will use evidence to explain why Earth's climate is changing. They will also make claims about the consequences of climate change on life on Earth (humans and other animals) and Earth’s system and explore how individual decisions can help the situation.

In January, we are finishing up our math reasoning routine: Connecting Representations. Students have been able to apply this routine in class when they are connecting graphs to linear equations in the form y=mx+b. This month we are going to start our 3rd routine: Capturing Quantities. This routine involves identifying quantities in a mathematical representation and creating a diagram or other representation that shows the relationship between the quantities. These relationships can be represented as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponential or a combination of them!

Students will be working on adding more strategies for reading comprehension to their academic toolkit. Students will be learning how to visualize as they read through a text. They will also be working on predicting what a text will be about by looking at context clues. Students will also continue to work on their organization strategies and continue to get organized in our virtual world.

At the beginning of November, students will be completing an end of unit counter narrative writing assessment based on their identity in order to build and understand our community. We will then move into a mini-unit introducing historical fiction using The Prince and the Pauper as our central text before diving into our first novel based unit, Inside Out and Back Again. We will continue to build off of central themes from our first unit; however, this time we will be doing so through a historical fiction lens.

Students just demonstrated their knowledge of rigid transformations, so we are ready to move on to dilations. Students will uncover the importance of scale factor and learn how it relates to proportionality. This will lead us into our unit about slope.

Students will be entering a unit that is centered on the rights of American citizens and what we should do if these rights are not protected. We will spend a considerable amount of time on the Bill of Rights and the events in American history that led to the creation of these rights. All of this will be compared to students' lives in order to determine if the ideals of the founding fathers have been upheld, and whether or not the rights of citizens are being protected.

Immersion Social Studies

See above.

Students will explore climate zones and investigate how factors such as latitude, elevation, oceans and the sun affect the climate of an area. They will then complete a "climate in our lives mini project" where they will compare and contrast the climates of two cities and analyze what factors cause the differences in climate between those cities.

We are continuing our journey to learning different mathematical routines. Math routines are different pathways of thinking that allow us to solve a math problem. This month, we are finishing our first routine, Recognizing Repetition, which prompts learners to sense the repetition in their math and calculation processes. Repeating the routine with different open middle tasks, allows students to apply this mental routine in their math classwork. Our next routine coming up is Connecting Representations. Stay tuned!

Students will continue to break down the components of a CER essay in small group. Students have been working on learning on how to develop a strong thesis or claim in group. We will be moving into learning more about how to select the strongest evidence to support a claim. Students will be continuing to work on reading strategies. October ended with previewing making connections and this month we will dive deeper into making text to text and text to world connections. We will also start to work on using summaries to help our comprehension of larger text. The last thing we will be working on is staying organized in our new virtual worlds. Weekly, students will be asked to check Aspen as well as Google Classroom to see what assignments they are missing and what their overall grades are.