​7th Grade Newsletter 

January 11, 2019   

 

Upcoming Events/ Updates 

January 11 - Progress Reports 
January 15 - Exploring Theater with Vaudeville 
January 18 - Half Day 
January 21 - MLK Day - No School 
  
 
From the Team:  
 
Happy New Year! The 7th grade team is looking forward to a positive and productive new year. As a 
way to have more communication, we are sending home a monthly newsletter to update parents on 
the happenings in the classroom. Hopefully, we can have the students write some of these updates 
this year so that you can hear from your child about the topics, activities, and other exciting events 
that are happening in the 7th grade. 
 
 
Class Updates 
 
Humanities:  
 
What makes a hero? Students in Humanities have spent the first half of the school year considering 
this question, beginning with the heroes of Ancient Greek Mythology. From there we’ve begun looking 
at heroes in the 20th century in both literature and history.   
 
The question of what makes a hero will remain central to our studies as we begin our informational 
writing unit this month. Students will be reading historic fiction connected to World War II while 
exploring the historical reality of that time period. They will learn to write literary essays, citing 
evidence and analyzing how texts reveal meaning. This unit is following a unit where we’ve been 
asking students to think critically about text and write paragraphs using evidence to support their 
thinking. These skills will greatly help the students as we move into the next unit and begin to write 
longer literary and analytical pieces. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Science:  
 
We just started a new unit on the human body. Students over the course of the next 6 six weeks are 
going to be doctors solving a mysterious case of a woman who called the ambulance because she 
was not feeling well and was unable to move. On the first day of our unit, students were introduced to 
the woman by reading the ambulance report of her case. By the end of the unit, they will be able to 
diagnose what is causing her to be sick and how they would treat her. As the class learns new 
symptoms and clues, they will be learning about the digestive, muscular, respiratory, circulatory, 
excretory, and nervous systems. Students will be doing many labs and experiments with each system 
with the possibility of a dissection of a small animal. Throughout the unit there will be one or two 
guest speakers who are in the medical field that will share their knowledge about the human body 
and expertise in the medical field. 
 
 
Math:  
 
Our current math unit looks at what happens to shapes when we stretch or shrink one or more 
dimensions. We began by developing personal logos and are modifying them in various ways with a 
final goal of printing them off as labels. This unit uses lot of math ideas students have studied over 
the past few years: fractions, decimals, percents, geometric shapes, area, perimeter, ratios and 
integers. It introduces several ways to stretch and shrink shapes and involves new ideas around 
drawing to scale, coordinate grids and algebraic rules. Along the way we consider real world 
applications including animation, video games and graphic and 3D design.    
 
 
Reminders: 
 
Wednesday Guided Study from 7:45- 8:25 and again at 2:45-3:45 with the team.​ This is a great time 
for any or all of the students to work with the team, to get help with any assignments, or to get 
caught up​.