Settling into Our Routine – Sept. 8-11

Here’s to hoping you all enjoyed the Labor Day weekend!

With a few weeks of school under our belts and the holiday weekend behind us, it’s time to settle into our weekly routine.  We’ll be using our writer’s notebooks and math journals daily for note taking, problem-solving, fluency activities, skills practice and more, so it’s important that you have both notebooks with you everyday.

It’s also important that you check your Schoology calendar daily to make sure that assignment due dates don’t sneak up on you.  (Be sure to read the assignment descriptions, which will tell you whether you need to submit your work, or whether I will check to see that it is done in class!)

This week in math, we begin investigating the concept of ratios–learning both the language used to describe a ratio relationship between two quantities and strategies for solving problems that involve ratios and unit rates.

In language arts, you’ll make you first attempt at writing an argument in The Case of Slip or Trip–weighing the evidence at a crime scene before drawing your own conclusions about what occurred, and then doing your best to craft an argument in which you make a clear claim, supported by evidence and reasoning.

We launched our study of ancient civilizations by walking in the shoes of paleontologist Don Johansen last week, doing our best to reconstruct the skeleton of his most famous discovery, Lucy, the remains of an early hominid fossil that turned out to be more than three million years old!  This week, we’ll take a closer look at the ways that early hominids adapted to their changing environments, including the technological advances they made with the aim of better understanding the developments that led to the first civilizations.