Imperial Linear Measurement

In math we are learning "imperial linear measurement." That means measuring lines (linear) using units like "feet, yards, miles, inches. It is "imperial" because it got started by a king. We are going to do metric in our next unit.

For Valentine's Day we did a "Tower of Hearts." It was pretty hard! We had to do estimating. Then we had to build a tower as tall as we could go. We measured it really carefully (without tipping it over!)

 We had to come up with different strategies to make the towers. A strategy is a plan.

We also got to figure out how many hearts it would take to make a tower as tall as we are. If you are 5'6" tall, it will take 265 hearts! 

We couldn't make an actual tower that tall but we did the math to figure it out. We even figured out how many hearts equals the tallest building in the world! The Burj Khalifa is in Dubai and it is 2,717 feet tall. That is 36,604 inches or 146,416 candy hearts.

When we got done, we got to eat the hearts. But, not 146,416 of them.

You are invited to come and see our work

These are some of the quotes we picked for our hallway display about civil rights and the right of non-violent protest.

We finished our English unit with a big writing project, too. Everybody got to pick a project. We had about 8 choices. We wrote sentences or essays. We did some research. We made a "KWL" chart on our classroom wall. "K" is for what we already KNOW. "W" is for what we WANT to find out. "L" is for what we LEARN as we do our research. We read articles, watched videos, read a speech, had discussions, got some library books, and talked about recent non-violent protests like Mni Wiconi at Standing Rock. It was really a lot of work!

The essays and paragraphs were hard but we did a good job. We used this writing process:

The writing process goes in a circle. In case you are wondering, a "spider" is a visual outline or graphic organizer. One spider makes one paragraph when we have to write the sentences. 

You should come and read our essays on the wall because they are really very impressive. When we had Parent Conferences, parents got to read them and they liked them a lot. A bunch of middle school students stopped to read them on their way to class. One said, "This is really interesting!" Another middle school student wanted to know if he can be in this class when he gets into high school.

 When we learned about non-violent protests like at Standing Rock or Montgomery, Alabama, we saw a lot of people with signs that they made. The signs told their truth. Sometimes the police and the government did not want to see the truth.

For our display, we painted signs to tell our truth. They go with our essays. The big one (that got chopped in the picture) says "Mitakuye owasin." That means we are all related. Even us and the people marching in the videos that we saw. That is part of our truth.

Please come see our work. Pidamaya!

Parent Conferences Wed. 2/13/19 2:00-6:00 pm

Wednesday, February 13, 2019  2 pm- 6 pm

Today was mid-quarter! Boy, this quarter has gone very fast!

Our teachers are putting in our mid-term grades. 

Parents/guardians are invited to come to Parent Conferences on Wednesday, February 13. 

Teachers are available from 2:00-6:00. Sister Patrice is ready to brag about the progress your young adult has made this quarter, so please come and let her make your day!

All our English classes are working on finishing their essays for our Civil Rights project. It will be a hallway display with signs, essays, and our favorite quotes. The hallway display is for our entire school, but is specially made for Parent Conferences. Come check it out!!

Wow! Time flies radically in our classroom!

In Math, each class is doing a different topic. Pythagoras has gotten to know our Period 6/7 Geometry group pretty well. We're studying Imperial Linear Measurement in both Per 1/2 and 8/9. Period 3 scholars are tackling the challenges of fractions, and Period 4 Geometry is going to dive into measuring angles with a protractor this week.

Can't make Parent Conferences between 2:00 and 6:00? Please contact S. Patrice by email (pcolletti@tzts.us) or text (414-232-0515) or leave a voice message at 414-502-7797 and we can set up a different time. You are such an important part of the learning team! 

Short week? We learn stuff anyway!

This week was very cold. So we got four days off! We had our shortest week ever. We just had school on Friday! We had a regular schedule. We did have a PEP Rally at 3:00 to honor our athletes who went to DOC (Dakota Oyate Challenge) and did really well.

Jaden, Glendean, and Lee added words to our Word Wall. They read our class newsletter. It gets mailed home on Monday. They used one color to annotate facts and a different color to annotate opinions. They circled Word Wall words and we put them into our Glossary. They also had some questions to answer to practice reading comprehension.

This is our Word Wall for Second Semester so far.

After lunch we did a math activity. We got to prove the Pythagorean Theorem! A Greek guy a long time ago figured it out. If you have a right triangle and you have the measurement of two sides, you can always figure out the third side. We cut out squares to prove that 

To use the Pythagorean Theorem, you also have to know about radical signs, square roots and perfect squares, not just exponents. We learned about them last week so we could work on the triangles.

After we finished proving Pythagoras was pretty smart, we had enough time for "Choice." We could choose from reading our BAM Book (Book-a-Month Club) or working on algorithms for our cube.

Maza did the cube. He has all the algorithms memorized and now he beat his own record! He had completed the Rubik cube in 1 minute and 27 seconds a couple weeks ago. Today he did it in 1 minute and 24 seconds!! It was amazing! He is still the fastest one in our school.

The rest of us enjoyed our BAM books: