Welcome to the Room 131 Webpage    

Language Arts:  Writing    Reading                                                                        Middle School 101  

Word Work:  Unit 1: Word Work Basics                               Social Studies Unit 1: Maps and Globes     

                      Unit 2: Prefixes, Suffixes and Roots                                       Unit 2: Early Humans 

                      Unit 3: Lessons 9-12 (Book 5)                                                 Unit 3: Neolithic Revolution

                      Unit 4:  Lessons 13-16 (Book 5)                                              Unit 4:  Ancient Middle East 

                           Unit 5:  Lessons 1-4 (Book 6)

                           Unit 6:  Lessons 5-8 (Book 6)

                           Unit 7:  Lessons 9-12 (Book 6)

                           Unit 8:  Lessons 13-16 (Book 6)

Weekly Updates:

11/10:  The walls are filling up with student work--personal timelines, personal narratives and fall-themed haiku.  Students did a great job today dramatizing or drawing origin myths from a variety of world cultures.  The summative assessment for myths is due Tuesday.  Students need to answer, in writing, some questions about the myth they performed today and to discuss some questions that apply to the group of myths we studied.  This is due Tuesday.   In social studies we finished our study of early hominins by looking at how modern humans are different from our earliest ancestors.  The key idea we discussed is that modern humans appear to be more versatile than earlier species and have adapted to change behaviorally (though culture), especially by adopting technology.   If you have time, watch (and students--re-view) the Nova Becoming Human series linked on the Early Humans page.  All the while we have been looking at the ways scientists learn about the past. Next week we'll start looking at "culture" and comparing different paloelithic cultures and modern nomadic, hunter-gatherer populations.   

11/6:  Last week we celebrated the publication of our first narratives, both in our class and with Ms. Cohen's 6th grade LA class.  We haven't written our last narratives, but we will be taking a little break and working in notebooks and publishing some poems.  We will have a big push in social studies, with both reading lessons and social studies goals around the same topics.  We will be reading origin myths, too. Please see the Early Humans page for documents and resources related to classwork in the upcoming week.  Mr. Santo and Mr. Stuart will be back with us. 

10/28  Excitement is running high with Halloween costumes and the dance today!  This week we pushed forward on our narratives.  FINAL narratives are due Monday.   

10/18 This week we enjoyed having Mr. Santo and Mr. Stuart, graduate students in Education from SU, in our classroom.  They will be back in two weeks for another week.  We are well into our personal narrative drafts.  All students should be well into their drafts.  Next week we will be revising, and on November 1 we will be publishing our first pieces.  In social studies we have started our Early Man unit.  We looked at the panoramic view of time with a 100' timeline depicting the history of the universe in the hallway.  Many students noted that there was a big gap in timeline events between the formation of Earth 4.6 BP and events from 2 mya to the present.  (Look at your dating vocabulary sheet if you can't remember what BP and mya mean.)  We had an interesting discussion about this gap with three theories emerging:  1) nothing happened; 2) nothing interesting happened; 3) we don't know what happened.   We also looked at a smaller scale timeline of the last 100,000 years and various human events in that timeframe.  Again, we considered what was chosen and NOT chosen for representation.  In the 100,000 years timeline we learned some mechanics of timelines and locating dates in the BCE and CE eras.  Students started thinking about the "top ten" events they would place on their own personal timelines as well.  Today Mr. Stuart gave us a lesson on how archaeologists make inferences from artifacts.  Next week we will be asking the big question "What makes us human" and looking at ancient ancestors from Australopithecus afarensis to Homo sapiens neanderthalensus.  Next week we will work on re-dos for the Geography unit. 

10/12  In period 1-2 we looked at "Kim" as a mentor text.  In period 4-5 we selected "seed" stories to turn into published personal narratives.  We reviewed for the Maps and Globes unit test in social studies.  Here is a quick link to the Quizlet for land and water features.  I also made a Quizlet link for studying spelling of plural nouns.  Choose the "spell" activity on this QUIZLET site; you will get a singular word as a prompt and you type in the correctly spelled plural.

10/11  In language arts we read a little of Seedfolks and worked on our personal narratives.  In social studies, 1-2 block learned about the difference between maps and globes and the problems of map projections.  We looked at how different choices in centering and orienting maps change our view (perception) of the world.  Block 4-5 learned about different types of maps and analyzed maps by using text features to find "what is the cartographer trying to teach me with this map?"  Homework:  land and water map due tomorrow; land and water feature definitions and comprehension worksheet also due if not completed in class. 

10/10 Today we learned to punctuate dialogue, because using a character's exact words gives readers a better understanding of the character.  In social studies we looked at different ways to make land and water feature maps.  Homework:  Letter to parent/guardian re: curriculum night signed (letter is for a grade); work on land and water map, due Wednesday (originally due Tuesday--extended one day); Word Work due Thursday this week because no school Friday.