Language Arts

We are finishing up our Lord of the Flies unit with a CCER on this essential question: Are the behaviors of the boys on the island a good representation of society and mankind’s human nature? They will use evidence from the novel and nonfiction articles. Students will also have a debate on topics from their literature circle big ideas to close out the unit the first week of March.

Moving through the rest of the month, we are fortunate to have two guest speakers to kick off our next unit and the student projects.  The first will be an attorney for the Colorado Department of Justice in the ADA division and the second will be advocates from the Colorado ADA office to show how they do the work that they do.  Throughout the month of March students will be reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time where the main character is a person with Autism.  Lit circle books focus on young people who may have deafness, blindness, autism, amputations… and they will evaluate a space in the school for accessibility then create a proposal to make the chosen space better.  

Please remind your student to check for any missing assignments as all late work for Q3 is due March 11.  

Math

 We are ending Unit 7 on angles, area and surface area and moving into Unit 3- Measuring Circles. In this unit they will dive deeper into the significance of pi and how to find the area and circumference of a circle.  They will have a “secret” PBL project in this unit, where they will create something they can wear during a holiday in March.  

Quarter 3 grades are due March 11th, along with 36 Proficient Skills completed in IXL.  Please make sure you are monitoring  your student’s progress to ensure they can participate in the Q3 Celebration. 

Integrated I Math

My favorite units are in March!

Students will be learning about Pythagorean Theorem, and its applications on the coordinate plane and in real-world situations. They will start by generalizing the formula for the Pythagorean Theorem using squares to see why a2 + b2 = c2. After this unit, students will learn about scatterplots and creating lines of best fit to tell the trend of a data set and make predictions. They will also learn to analyze how strong or weak the correlation of a scatterplot is.

Science

Students are still ‘knee deep’ in our Human Biology unit as we head into March.  We’ve successfully figured out how the body makes energy through the process of cellular respiration (and filmed a model of it to prove it!).  Now, we turn our attention to the most complex, most mysterious and most interesting organ system of all - the nervous system.  Our exploration will begin with learning about the peripheral nervous system and the three types of nerves that run throughout the body.  Students will participate in a reflex lab to determine what type of sensory receptors (sight, hearing and touch) respond the fastest to stimuli.  From there, students will explore THE BRAIN!  We will learn about its basic anatomy and functions before exploring some mysteries of the brain - the placebo effect, why humans and other mammals dream and much more!  At the end of this mini-unit within a unit, students will choose a brain disorder to research and teach other classmates about in a short presentation.

We will round out the unit with our second Interim Assessment of the year, which will take place the week of March 9th.  It is part of their grade for Quarter 3, so please make sure your child has used their study guide to review before taking the exam.

Social Studies

Students wrapped up their Economics and Geography unit last week and  just started their Sub-Saharan Africa unit. We started by examining primary and secondary sources to explore Africa’s rich culture and pre-colonial roots.. Students will continue this exploration through multiple sources as well as  maps, videos, and readings.  We’ll then go into colonization’s impact through African and European perspectives. Students will work to gather evidence in order to write a CCERER response to the question, “How did colonization affect the lives and identities of people in Sub-Saharan Africa?” Students will then move into a case study around South Africa, apartheid, and healing through Ubuntu. 

In late March, we’ll start our fifth unit, “Traveling the Silk Road”. If you have any extra art supplies (pipe cleaners, extra fabric, buttons, ribbons, etc.) sitting around the house that you no longer need, please reach out or send them to school with your students  as we can use these for the upcoming unit.