6th Grade Weekly News

October 7, 2016

This is a newsletter produced and compiled by our 6th grade teaching team. Enjoy!

Room Parent Announcements:

ANNUAL PRAYER BREAKFAST

Please join us for our annual prayer breakfast after the 8:15am Mass on OCTOBER 21st. Our special

guest speaker is Reverend Gerald Horan, Vicar of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Orange. The

Prayer Breakfast is free, however, a suggested donation of $10 would be appreciated for hospitality

costs. Childcare will also be available at $7 per child (payable at the door). Please CLICK HERE to

RSVP for breakfast and/or reserve childcare by Monday October 17th.

Family Movie Night Friday, October 14th is Family Movie Night at The Parish School. We will be screening Disney's "Zootopia." Come watch as an intelligent, rookie bunny cop has to work with a cynical fox to uncover a conspiracy in their city of Zootopia! For more information and to purchase tickets visit: www.stedwardevents.com/family-movie-night Upcoming Events: Tuesday 10/11:

● JSERRA Assembly in the Gym 11:00 - 11:45 ● Mock Election - Voting for Upper School sponsored by 8th grade

Wednesday 10/12: ● Jeans for Jesus - Jean pants and uniform top

Thursday 10/13 ● St. Edward the Confessor Feast Day Mass @ 8:15 Mass Uniform required ● JSERRA Field Trip 10:30-12:30 Special Guest Speaker Fr. Greg Boyle

Friday 10/14:

● Prayer Partner Activity in lieu of Mass ● PGO Movie Night - Zootopia 6:00-9:00pm on the field

ELA We wrapped up our work on literary elements this week. Students completed the notes pages in their IANs (interactive notebooks) and worked to identifying each element using a few practice stories. After discussing their answers and providing the evidence from the stories to back-up their answers, the learners then completed an open-IAN quiz. In writing class, we are continuing with our Jane Schaffer Writing Program introduction. Students worked in small groups to come up with concrete details and commentary to answer the prompt, “How did Cinderella feel at the end of the story?” Next week, learners will continue to work with their group to put together their first official JSW paragraph. After completing the IOWA Testing each day this past week, learners returned to their homeroom class and began the Middle School Reads novel, Nothing But the Truth. This novel has sparked quite a bit of conversation amongst all the learners and I have heard lots of feedback during all my ELA classes. I’m excited to take over the reading of the novel in reading class and look forward to several weeks of discussion, debate, and fun with the novel. I have asked all students NOT to read ahead so we can all stay together to find out what happens. Finally, students were given a packet on Friday (except 7th period reading class - they will receive it on Monday morning) regarding future book reports for the rest of our school year. This packet contains a list of due dates and projects learners may select from for each report. I will also post this packet on my Edlio home page. My hope is these projects will support their independent reading and give learners the opportunity to be creative in their reporting. Please make sure your child is reading and reporting on a book that is at their reading level. Learners have been instructed to take notes as they read (using the notes page provided in the packet) and not wait until the last minute to complete their projects. If you or your learner have questions about the book reports over the year, please email me or encourage your learner to come talk with me. STEM: In STEM this week, we explored erosion and deposition. Early in the week, we created streambed models and investigated how factors such as gradient, load, and discharge affects the amount of erosion that occurs along the created stream. Learners discovered that an increase in any of these factors increases the amount of erosion. Whether comparing the processes to trains dropping off passengers or carpools dropping off riders, learners were able to relate sedimentary movement to other real-world processes. On Friday, we

observed how glacial movement affects Earth’s surface as we moved our homemade glaciers across clay crusts.

Social Studies: This week in social studies we started our new unit on Archaeology. We looked at what archaeology means through the lens of Indiana Jones and compared that to what real archaeologists do. After learning the

difference between fossils and artifacts we looked at some pictures of ancient artifacts and tried to identify the purpose of each artifact and supported our ideas with facts and descriptions. We also discussed how mummies are preserved and compared natural mummies to prepared mummies. We enjoyed looking at pictures of mummies that were preserved in different ways: frozen, dried, embalmed, tanned and many more!

The weekly Scholastic News Magazine issues can be accessed on the ipad (magazines app) or online at http://magazines.scholastic.com. Our classroom code is 6thgradesnews all one word (6th grade’s news). This is a helpful tip for misplaced magazines! Extra copies are also always available in the classroom!

Math We had a great week, back to our regular schedule in 6th grade math! I was so proud of all the students who really took their time to prepare and put forth their best efforts on the Unit 1 assessment. This week, I set up Khan Academy classrooms for each 6th grade class, and all students should have received a Khan Academy username and ID linked to our classroom. Students may use Khan Academy as a support and enrichment resource throughout the school year. They can access Khan Academy through the app on their

iPads at school, or through the Khan Academy website from a device at home. We are well underway in our studies of real numbers. Looking forward to next week, learners should by now all be aware that we are correcting Simple Solutions on a daily basis, to give more of an opportunity for questions. As always, I am here for support and questions!

Art .

This coming week the learners will begin the research for their first art history lesson. Each learner will be

assigned a slide to research. Then the learners will present the information to the class. The Artist we are

studying is Helen Hardin a Native American Artist for New Mexico.

Spanish

Please keep Mrs. Cope and her family in your prayers.

Religion

This week we had our first opportunity of the year for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at the church. Sixth graders also studied the Biblical story of Noah as part of our ongoing study of covenants in salvation history. Finally, we spent a significant amount of time preparing for Friday’s first unit test. . Makerspace The sixth graders are engineering a basket for Humpty Dumpty for the next time he falls off of a wall! Each group of learners will get ten straws, six cotton balls, one plastic bag, and tape. When the baskets are complete, the learners will get a Humpty Dumpty egg, put it in the basket, and they will drop it from a high point outside to see which baskets were the most structurally sound. Additionally, the students will begin to learn about computer coding through block coding with various computer games, with the end goal of programming a Sphero robot!