Headlines 1/30

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and was able to enjoy warmer temperatures and sunshine! I am happy to be back to a regular schedule this week and looking forward to learning and accomplishing a great deal.

Tuesday, February 14th is Great Hearts Day! We have reserved this special day to focus on the virtue of friendship and celebrate the traits that make a great-hearted student. We are planning interactive and fun activities centered around these topics, and time will be writing poems for our classmates.  Archway Arete strives to cultivate a rich, academic environment rooted in the classical tradition. This many times requires popular culture to be left at the door. On that note, students will not be permitted to bring store-bought valentines, candy, or gifts to school. Thank you for partnering with us. Pleas be on the lookout for a sign-up genius for goodies for our celebration!

ELA

We are enjoying reading The Secret Garden and identifying character traits as we read. We are focusing on finding textual evidence to support our inferences and opinions as we read.

This week in grammar we will introduce transitive and intransitive verbs. We will also be discussing our next writing project. Students will be writing a research paper over one of our explorers from our History Unit. The will be bringing home a packet today with all the information and a signature page to complete. This will be a long term project culminating in class presentations with a poster board. Please be on the lookout for this to come home tonight!

We will have our quiz over Roots 59-61 on Wednesday.  Students should study these nightly!

Poem recitations of  “The Road  Not Taken” by Robert Frost will be Wednesday, February 1st. We will also be learning our new poem, I, Too, by Langston Hughes.

Math

We began our next unit covering decimals on Friday, and we will continue this week, learning to order, add, and subtract decimals. We will be having math groups on Wednesday and a short quiz on Thursday. Math tests over Unit 6 went home on Friday. This was a very challenging unit and a difficult test. Therefore, as a team we decided to grade this test on a curve, and we will be revisiting these concepts later in the year. Math corrections are due on Tuesday for all students!

Science

We will continue to learn about the plant kingdom. We are learning about seed plants and Angiosperms specifically this week. There will be a quiz on the parts of a flower on Feb. 2nd.

History

This week, students will continue to learn about the Age of Exploration. We will be covering Marco Polo, the technology used during this time period, motives for travel, and the prominent Portuguese explorers, Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama.