Happy rainy Friday! This week we continued to find our stride with our weekly work load and starting our subject lessons.

In Math we continued to look at negative and positive numbers adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. We reviewed lowest common multiples and highest common factors as well as square and cubes. We will finish up next week before jumping into our next unit on expressions and formulae.

Clauses were our grammar focus this week. We looked at independent and depend clauses and how they work together in compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence types. Our writing focus was on compare and contrasts non-fiction texts. We analyzed a text together in class, then students worked independently on their own.

In History we are looking at the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations and their contributions to the modern world. We are using the GRAPES acronym; geography, religion, achievements, politics, economy, and society to hit on all the key features of the civilizations we will look at. This will help us make comparisons later! Geography class complemented our lesson as we located the regions of ancient civilizations on a map. We will continue to look at the empires of the fertile crescent next week!

Inputs and outputs were the theme of ICT; we looked at various digital devices and what ways we interact with and receive responses. This will continue to be our theme as we look at how we can input instructions into our computers to have them produce the desired outcome programming a game.

Science saw us looking at the parts of animal and plant cells. We identified and labeled the organelles and their functions. We are taking a lot of detailed notes in class and I encourage all my students to take their notebooks home to review and study. (Just be sure to bring them back Monday!) It’s a lot of information, but it will come together as we start taking a look at real cells on slides!

This week for homework there is some reading comprehension with written answers, a cut/paste matching independent and dependent clauses, and some math that complement what we covered this past week. There is no digital homework this week – I would like to incorporate more, but not everyone is submitting it, so until we work out the kinks, paper it is.

Mr. Green also has an art task for every student; the butterfly template should be decorated and returned by Friday September 22nd.

Have a lovely weekend and see you Monday,

Mrs. Leah