February 29, 2016
Dear Families,
Happy Leap Year! Please check out the new photos in the slide show to the right! Sixth graders have been busy, busy, busy over the past months, and so have the sixth grade teachers! I look forward to giving more frequent updates on our website during our final trimester! Please read the information below about our Reading, Math and Science curriculum to get up to date on your child's learning experiences. This is the last week of the trimester. Grades close on Friday, so there are no weekly homework assignments to allow student to wrap up test retakes and missing work. Be looking for a paper coming home soon for you to sign up for parent conferences. In this post, I want to share some interesting, though not necessarily surprising observations about math test scores. I have noticed there is a close correlation between students who complete their homework on time and those who do not. I decided, for fun, to graph the relationship between the atest homework score and the Chapter 3 test score. For each ten homeworks, students receive one combined entry in Power School. (Essentially each assignment is worth 10 points of that grade. Assignments are awarded points purely on completion, not on accuracy. Points are deducted for late work or work that is incomplete or does not show work.) You can see the graph here. Although there are a few students who have lower homework scores who still passed the test, most notable is that EVERY student who scored an 80 or higher on homework passed the test. The scores drop considerably the lower the homework completion score is. I showed the students this graph to impress upon them the value of doing homework. There continues to be a number of students who do not consistently do the nightly homework. These students miss out on a significant portion of learning both while doing the homework and in the classroom, when we discuss questions about the homework. Please check your own child's homework score in Power School, and talk with them about the value of doing this nightly skill work. Sincerely, Laura White |
Sixth Grade Moments 2015-16 |
ReadingThis March and April, we will be combining classes again during reading time to read historical fiction Holocaust novels.This reading unit has been taught to sixth graders at Chesterfield School for over 17 years. We continue to teach it because it is a valuable vehicle for teaching curricular requirements such as author’s craft, theme, the genre of historic fiction, and more. This important topic remains relevant today, is a part of the curriculum at Keene High, and teaches civic responsibility as well as history. We also encourage communication between home and school. Please contact us with any questions or concerns you have, and we will do the same. We invite all parents who so desire to borrow a book and/or look over the teaching material beforehand. Many children come to sixth grade with a fragmented understanding of World War II and the Holocaust. Having the opportunity to clear up misconceptions and to develop an understanding of the bigger picture is often reassuring for them.
Our curricular goals for this unit include:
In January and February we completed a biography unit. All students read Arctic Explorer: The Story of Matthew Henson by Jeri Ferris. During this unit we mixed students from different homerooms and used the Literature Circle approach, in which students plan and lead their own discussion groups. We coached students in learning these skills. Specific skills we focused on included inferring, supporting ideas with evidence from the text, summarizing, and vocabulary. Finally, as this is the story of an African American who achieved great things in spite of the discrimination he faced, our learning emphasized social issues such as prejudice then and now. Our Second Unit of the year was a Short Story Unit. This unit focused on Theme. Students practiced identifying the author's theme and message. In addition we compared how different texts treated the same theme, focusing on the theme of "Family". For this unit we read the following short stories:
Our first unit of the year centered around the novel Crash by Newbery Award-winning Author Jerry Spinelli. In addition to being a hit with sixth graders, this novel deals with the issue of bullying, from the interesting perspective of the perpetrator. During this unit we focused on:
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MathAfter finishing an introductory unit on Algebraic Expressions in the beginning of February, we started a geometry unit. This unit focuses on finding the area of polygons such as parallelograms, triangles and trapezoids. Students apply their understanding of the how to find the area of a rectangle and their knowledge of algebraic expressions to derive and formulas (really just algebraic expressions!) for the area of these shapes. This unit also includes a review of coordinate graphing. Sixth Grade Math Overview; Chesterfield School has adopted a new math curriculum, Big Ideas, for grades 6-8. We are following its general flow, as well as supplementing it with other fun and relevant learning experiences. One of these is the weekly Problem of the Week (POTW). Monday's math class is usually dedicated to the Problem of the Week. Generally the POTW is a way for me to give students more rigorous and in-depth and less-routine problem-solving experiences. There is always a writing component in which students must communicate mathematical reasoning in words. Often these POTW involves a real-life application of a concept we are studying, or review a concept that will be studied in depth in the coming weeks. It is not unusual for students to have to "repair" their problems of the week and make corrections. This repair work is often the meat of the learning, in that when you have to fix your mistakes that's when you focus on areas of individual growth. |
Science ENERGY TRANSFERS AND TRANSFORMATIONS
This January we kicked off a unit on Energy. The focus of this unit has been understanding the different forms of energy and how energy can transfer from one object to another and transform from one form to another. We have done a variety of experiments in class to explore these transformations transfers and also touch on their application to the world around us. Students are now completing a project in which they design a Rube Goldberg Machine and describe some of the energy transfers and transformations in their design. Our next portion of this unit will focus on applying these concepts to understand how electricity is generated. This will include an exploration of electromagnets and a crank generator. Our study of energy will also build necessary background knowledge to understand the basics of climate change and our tulip experiments (see below for information about the tulip experiments). MYSTERY CLASSROOM: At the beginning of February we kicked off our Mystery Classroom project which is an integration of math and science. Some portions are completed in math and others in science class. Like our Tulip Experiments, this is a program facilitated through Journey North. Each student is assigned a mystery class and over the course of several months receives weekly clues that guide him or her to determining the exact location (to the town or city) of the class. Most of the clues are sunrise and sunset times, so the students must do some math to calculate and graph daylength and use the rate and direction of change in daylength to draw conclusions about the location of their classroom. At the equinox, when all locations on the same longitude experience sunrise at the same time, students are able to calculate the longitude of their classroom. Later internet searches about geography or culture clues help students confirm the continent, country, state/province and town of their class. The learning goal of the project is to really understand the reasons for the seasons and how the position of the earth relative to the sun changes and influences the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth receive during the course of the year. Students learn about time zones, Universal Time, the Equinox and other concepts. What I love about this project is that it really is a mystery (even I do not know the locations of the mystery classrooms!), and that the students must apply their understanding of concepts like latitude, longitude and the position of the earth to draw conclusions. Ask your child what he she has already figured out about his or her class's location. SOILS AND NUTRIENT CYCLES: This fall we completed a unit on soil and nutrient cycles. This unit tried to answer the question: Where does soil come from? That question let us to a study of decomposition and and from there to a more in depth study of how matter cycles through our world. This lead to an exploration of wastewater treatment. What happens when you use the bathroom? We learned about a PeeRecycling Project in Brattleboro (see link below) and toured the Keene Wastewater Treatment plant, and had Septic Engineer Tom Randall come speak to the class. My hope is that by studying real-world application of scientific content, students will see the value of what they are learning, be exposed to careers, and be more likely to remember it. In addition I hope they come to see that human beings can use scientific knowledge, to both develop technology (How do you design an effective septic tank?) as well as justify simple life style choices (what about a composting toilet?) that can make our world a better place. TULIP TEST GARDENS: In October , the sixth graders planted a Journey North Tulip Test Garden. This is a citizen science project in which students all over the northern hemisphere gather data that will help scientists track climate change. Is spring coming earlier? Gathering data on when tulips emerge and bloom over time across the world is helping scientists learn more about our changing climate, and our students will be contributing to this project this year. In addition to the bigger project, students designed their own tulip experiments.Through the tulip garden process students will experience the full cycle of science from hypothesis to experiment design to data collection and analysis of results. At this point students have studied vocabulary such as controlled and independent variables, dependent variable and fair test. Some questions they are asking include, "Will changing the depth affect when a tulip emerges?" and "Will planting a bulb upside down affect when it emerges?" We have 10 different experiments planned. Ask your child what his or her group is testing! THE SCIENCE CHECKLIST: We kicked off our science class this year with a brief exploration of the question: What is Science? After some introductory activities students will be applying the Science Checklist to various scenarios. Science...
For more information: The Science Checklist Coming soon:
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