Week one: complete
Hey there, Philomath Microschool community! Professors Althoff and Smith here, happy to report a successful first full week of the school year. Among other things, students have learned about how images and words work together to express a message, as they’ve demonstrated with these awesome school memes!
In Math, 4th grade has been reviewing place value, rounding, and estimation. Next week we will focus on reviewing addition and subtraction with regrouping. In 6th grade, the students have been focused on their skills in mathematical practice (making sense of and persevering in solving problems, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, constructing and defending mathematical arguments, modeling, using appropriate tools strategically, and attending to precision). Next week we start investigating rates and ratios.
In Science the students have already proven themselves to be skilled and curious researchers. 4th graders have been focusing on behavioral and structural adaptations that make certain animals well suited for thriving in the most extreme conditions. Whether it be in the extreme heat of the desert, extreme cold of the Arctic, or the darkness at the bottom of the ocean, animals can be found in places where we once thought life was impossible. We still have one more extreme environment to explore next week: extreme altitude.
In 6th grade, we have been focusing on finding out as much as we can about the basic building blocks of all living things: cells. The students have been researching both plant and animal cells looking for similarities, differences, parts, and functions. Next week we will move on to body systems and dive deeper into the specific cells needed within the human body.
And in English and Language Arts, we’ve introduced a few major routines that we’ll be following all year long. In addition to our Daily Oral Language, a quick sentence-correction activity that starts off every ELA class, we started keeping a running vocabulary list in the back of our notebooks. Students will be expected to add four or five new vocabulary words to their notebook every week, and we’ll be having vocabulary/spelling quizzes on those words every other week, so please check to make sure they’re keeping up!
Next week we have a few assignments to watch out for, including an in-class reading comprehension quiz due on Wednesday and
a vocabulary quiz on Friday.
That’s about all for now. Thank you for helping your child develop critical school habits like arriving to class on time and staying focused during the class period. It’s clear this is going to be an amazing school year. Thanks for all you do!
