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January News
Grade seven students each received an environmentalist like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Leopold Aldo, Wangari Maathai, David Suzuki among others to read about from the book Champions of the Environment by Bruce and Carol L. Malnor. They answered questions about their lives and contributions to the world in regards to the environment. Then students divided into groups and created a power point on their environmentalist. Students shared their power points to the class. This activity is in preparation for their research paper, which will be about an environmental problem. It will begin in January. Since Thoreau was an advocate for nature, as well as one of the early environmentalists, this project corresponds to the Social Justice Principle of Taking Care of God’s Creation, as well as an activity based from the book Henry David Thoreau Bell Ringer for Justice. In Math the 7th grade has started learning more about proportional relationships and percentages. We have looked at different ways to represent this including tape diagrams. There are multiple ways to solve these problems. We are learning about percent increase and percent decrease in particular. In Reading class the students looked at fictional and informational passages on topics including Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Chinese New Year, and winter and used reading skills include such as making inferences, identifying settings, identifying cause and effect, making predictions, using context clues, and characterization to work on comprehension of story elements, making inferences and using text-based information. We also had fun reading The Night Before Christmas where the students worked on teamwork and controlled oral reading. The story was broken up on cards and handed out to the students. The students were instructed to read their card with good expression and fluency. We started with the student who had the card with the title, author, and the first two lines of the poem. It was imperative that students listened to the last three or four words of the previous card for the "clue words" that gave a sign to what card was to be read next. It was a great exercise in listening and reading orally while celebrating the holiday! In social studies the 7th grade has begun our investigation into the great trading civilizations of West Africa. These civilizations, Ghana, Mali and Songhai relied heavily on trade, particularly of gold and salt. We are starting our unit by learning about the diverse physical geography of the world's second largest continent.