SEL - Ongoing embedded social emotional lessons occur daily.  Class meetings are  regularly embedded into the day and a reflection will end each week.  In addition to these, we are #aldrinallin.  We encourage acceptance, flexibility, and noticing the world around us.

Literacy  - For our seventh unit of the year, we are focusing on a variety of informational texts about ancient civilizations. The skills that are being taught are citing text evidence, determining a central idea and summarizing, analyzing how parts of a text fit into the overall structure, and tracing and evaluating author's claims. Our next reading test of the year will be on Thursday, February 19th.

Writing - For our sixth writing unit, students will be revisiting informative writing. Students will learn about transitional words and phrases, strong endings, how to research people, and reliable sources. They will research an important person of their choice and create a slideshow presenting the information they have gathered about their individual to share with the class.

Social Science- Our next social science unit of the year is exploring what makes a good leader, which will also be connected to our writing unit. Students will learn about this topic through a video on how leaders and events shape communities, and they will be reading about leaders throughout time. Students will then create a "trading card" to demonstrate the important qualities of their selected individual. The essential question for the unit is: "What makes a good leader?"

Science - The students will be exploring rock transformations through the essential question of the unit, "How do rocks form and change?" The anchor phenomenon centers around why rock samples from the Great Plains and from the Rocky Mountains are composed of similar minerals but look so different and come from different areas. They will be focusing on this topic through simulations, readings, a lab, and evaluating evidence. Students will demonstrate their understanding in a written response at the end of the unit.

Mulvihill/Walsh/Zeller Math - The eighth math module of the year focuses on ratios, percents, and fraction division. We will be reviewing what ratios are and link them to fractions, percentages, and decimals. Students will also learn how to find the percentage of a number as well as a whole given a part and percentage. Then, we will revisit fractional division and learn the invert-and-multiply method. There will be two checkpoints that students will complete; one after the 9th lesson, and one after the 12th lesson of this module. 

Weber Math - Unit 4 focuses on expressions and more equations. Students will learn how to rewrite expressions with fewer terms, apply the distributive property to factor, solve linear equations and describe features of linear equations that have on solutions, no solution, or many solutions. The end of unit assessment will be on January 16th.