In advisory, students have been revising their “Story of Self” with peers in order to make revisions before presenting to a larger audience of their peers. Students have begun exploring their own personal ideas of “The Good Life” through reflecting on the futures that they want and the actions they must take now in order to get to their “Good Life.” Students are required to perform seven hours of community service for their portfolio; opportunities will be offered throughout the year by the 7th grade team, but students are encouraged to seek out-of-school volunteer activities with parent or guardian supervision in order to fulfill this requirement.
In science, students are finishing their chemistry unit as we explore different types of chemical reactions. Students use their prior knowledge of properties to determine when a chemical reaction has occurred. We will dig deeper into the chemistry of reactions by modeling the rearrangement of atoms and creation of new molecules by balancing chemical equations while collecting evidence that supports the scientific principle of the conservation of matter.
In ELA, students are reading
A Long Walk To Water by Linda Sue Park. The novel takes place in Sudan and is based on the second Sudanese War. The novel has two protagonist Nya and Salva. The essential questions we will be focusing on throughout this unit are: How do individuals survive in challenging environments? How do culture, time, and place influence the development of identity? How does juxtaposing multiple characters help an author develop and contrast their points of view
In math, students are pacing through the standards 7.RP.2a, 7.RP.2b, and 7.RP.2c. We continue our journey with unit rates, ratios, and proportional relationships; as the trail has now exposed us to various diagrams such as, tables and graphs. The students are learning to represent a proportional relationship in a table, graph, and as an equation. We'll extend our knowledge to use the information from the displays to answer real-world scenarios.
In social studies, students wrapped up the quarter with their first documents-based questions essay (DBQ). Students looked at primary and secondary sources to answer the question, "Why did Islam spread so quickly?" Now that we have finished our unit on Islam, we will be moving into our unit on West Africa, where we will focus on the achievements of the great kingdoms of Mali, Ghana, and Songhai.