May 19th Update — Happy Friday!

Hello Everyone!

Sorry for the more intermittent updates, but it has been a very busy week with the musical going on! Thank you to everyone who performed, whether as part of our class performance, as one of the instrument group, or as a cast member. You all did a great job and we received some great feedback because of your hard work!

This week we have been working away on MACC Mall products, our new unit, and independent research.

MACC MALL will be on Tuesday, May 24th. Currently we have four classes coming to visit us. They have been given their ticket money and instructions, and our class posted their advertisements in the hallways today. Today we took some time to update our budgets for the project via excel, and I reminded everyone to ensure they record their patent fee, safety check fee, MACC Mall space rental fee, and other supply charges. As everyone tallied their expenditures, they started to realize that they may have to raise their prices in order to make more profit, especially as 12% of what they make will have to be paid in taxes to the government! Tomorrow will be our last class day to work on this project. Good luck with your sales! When we finish, we will be doing a reflection on the overall process.

Independent Projects: Ms. Ho, our librarian, let us know that the four-book limit does not apply to books for special classwork, so many students are checking out additional resources. She has everyone’s project topic and is doing what she can to get books. You will need to go to the public library if you haven’t already to make sure you have more resources. Remember: you must use some books! And if you are taking notes, whether on Evernote, Google Sheets, or otherwise, you must document your resources. If you don’t know what you need to document, please make sure you ask.

Myths!: We had discussion about the purpose behind and the elements of myths in connection with our new unit. Everyone looked up the story of Pele and Vulcan to do a comparison (venn diagram) between the two gods related to volcanoes. Also, students have been asked to read two explanatory myths and answer this question: Why is it that two different cultures, in two different parts of the world, that did not have contact with one another, explained something in a similar way? What is the same between the two myths and what is different?

Math: We have been using a lot of applied math in terms of money, decimals, and percentages, along with discussions of interest and economics-based topics. We are also doing some concrete math work around the conversion of decimals to fractions to ensure we all have the skills we need. Those who are more advanced received word challenge problems around this concept that were about situations involving money. We will continue this concrete math work through until the end of the year.

French: Tomorrow students will continue working on our dialogues. We hope to present them by next Friday, with more class time next week to practice.

Re-Writes of Writing Assessment are due tomorrow.

No School on Monday! Have a lovely, three-day weekend! I look forward to continuing our work after a short break!

Happy Friday!

Ms. D