6th Grade Newsletter
February 7, 2022
Important Dates
- February 21st - President’s Day Holiday
Language Arts
What are we learning?
- Students will understand that research is a spiraling process. Curiosity and knowledge drive research, leading to deeper understandings and more questions.
- Students will understand that published research represents current understanding which continues to develop based on new discoveries.
- Students will understand that concepts are constructed through a variety of actions and interactions with others.
Home/School Connection
- How do researchers use their curiosity to guide their research?
- What implications does my research have on our changing world?
Math
What are we learning?
- Students are learning to identify the coordinate of a point on the coordinate plane.
- Students are learning to graph an ordered pair on the coordinate plane
Home/School Connection
- Pull up a map of Reston and give your student some coordinates to explore.
- Pick out places on the map and have your student identify the coordinates.
Science
What are we learning?
- The connections between water resources and agriculture, power generation, and public health dictate the need for water conservation.
- Matter is made up of atoms that interact in a predictable way to form all substances in the universe.
- Water has unique chemical properties that make it essential to life.
Home/School Connection
Ask your student the following questions:
- How can water resources be managed responsibly?
- Why should we have practices for the wise use and protection of water as a natural resource?
- How do the unique properties of water make it so important to life on Earth?
- How can you describe, identify, and model the components of matter?
AAP Content
We will continue to form generalizations of patterns through our work in each subject area.
- Math
- We are finishing up our current unit, Introduction to Functions. Students are developing an understanding of and fluency with multiple representations of functions that model a multiplicative or additive relationship. We are learning to describe the slope, m, as the rate of change in a proportional relationship and identify the y-intercept in a graph or equation.
- Our next unit is Triangles & Quadrilaterals. During this unit students continue to explore the concept of proportionality in relation to shapes. They learn that for figures to be similar they must have corresponding angles which are congruent and corresponding sides which are proportional. Students will utilize proportional reasoning strategies they have honed during other units to solve problems (including practical problems) involving similar quadrilaterals and triangles.
- Language Arts
- After finishing up our poetry unit, we will dive into issue based research. In this unit, students take on the role of reader, writer, and researcher. Emphasizing the process over product helps students more fully appreciate the importance of research and see the relevance of research skills in their lives.
- Social Studies
- In our current unit, students are exploring the patterns that developed throughout the time of the American Revolution. We will analyze the role of key people and key events and their impact on the time leading up to the American Revolution. In addition, we will follow the lives of real men and women on all sides of the Revolutionary conflict and the difficult decisions free and enslaved people of African descent made during the Revolutionary War in Virginia.
- Science
-
- Our next unit explores water quality and conservation. Water is one of the most essential resources of living things and the processes supporting life. The maintenance of water quality is directly related to the maintenance of life on Earth. It is important for students to understand that “clean” water is a very subjective term. What it means for any body or water or waterway to be “clean” depends on the intended use of that water and by what or whom. It is important for students to understand that their present actions will impact the future state of water in their local community, as well as the global one. Through this unit we will take a closer look at human and natural changes in water quality & ecosystems.