Sixth Grade Sedulous Scholars: "Shakespeareanese" and Heat!

This morning found our scholars speaking "Shakespeareanese" as we traveled through a number of common phrases coined by my hero, Shakespeare. We discussed the endless time element of his writings and that since the focus of the playwright was love, betrayal, loyalty, and the like, that his plays have a timeless message for all of us. We can all certainly learn something from Shakespeare!

We were off to our Math homework on number lines quite quickly afterwards and spent our entire math hour and a half working on yesterday's work. The pace will begin to quicken as we have over 150 lessons to complete in 180 days of school. We will be working on lesson two, and hopefully three tomorrow. These lessons deal with prime factorization and common factors and multiples. You can help your scholar to discern these two words by reiterating that factors are parts of a whole, such as 2 and 4 being factors of 8, whereas when we use the term "multiple" we are talking about multiplying, and therefore we are looking to a larger number, not a smaller part of a number.

Our first music class was today, and the scholars played a delightful piece when I went to get them from class. After lunch we journeyed into our first science unit on heat. Bill Nye welcomed us as we discussed Conduction, Convection and Radiation. We then ran a quick little experiment with soap and "radiated" some of it in the microwave (see photos). We concluded that Ivory soap contained more air than Dial soap. Heat was the catalyst we used for our experiment.

We then began our discussion of RESPECT, our first foundational stone of the year. Our discussion surrounded the building of a house, and how without respect for the foundation, the walls would likely not stand for very long. Without showing and practicing respect it is almost impossible to practice integrity, responsibility, and self-control let alone citizenship and cooperation! We will persevere and "build" our character house on the 6th grade character wall this year!

I hope to see most of you, if not all of you this evening.
~Mrs. G.