Math & Science Curriculum Updates

As the end of trimester 1 quickly approaches, I wanted to provide you with an update on what student's have been working on in Math and Science.

Our second unit in Math is well underway, and we have completed the first 10 lessons in this unit.  Students are learning how to use ratios to solve real world problems.  Some of these problems involve cooking, shopping, shades of paint, and speed.  As we work through this unit, students are learning to navigate double number lines and tables as tools to help us organize our work involving ratios.  By the end of this unit, students should be able to use double number lines and tables to help them solve problems involving ratios.  They should be able to identify when two ratios are equivalent, create equivalent ratios, and reason about things happening at the same rate.

As a way to help your child master these skills in our second unit, you may help guide your child to do additional practice on the Khan Academy website which is tailored to our math program, Illustrative math.  The link for the second unit is here. 

A quick reminder that students are expected to complete 30 minutes of IXL weekly.  Each week I select one or two skills that students should work on and they can find those skills posted on their math google classroom page.  This weekly routine and assignment is graded as a classwork grade which accounts for 20% of their grade in math.  Please check in with your child each week to be sure they are completing this assignment.

Our third unit in science is also well underway.  During this unit, students will be discovering how Earth's land masses change over time.  We have been studying evidence presented by Alfred Wegener which he used to support his theory of continental drift.  Students recently started writing an argument paper to convince scientists of the early 1900s to support Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift.  After students study continental drift, they will discover how the continents are able to move through studying seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.  As we learn about seafloor spreading we will have a mini-unit on density in order to connect the ideas that the denser ocean plates submerge under continental plates.  Finally, we'll wrap up the unit by studying the rock cycle and learning how to analyze rock layers.