Bi-Weekly Learning Focus

Here's a quick update on what we're working during the next two weeks.

MATH: We are continuing to focus on Ratios, Unit Rates, and Fractional Relationships, with a goal of learning new ways to solve authentic problems. This week, we will be focusing on learning how to use tape diagrams and paper folding to calculate our fractional progress toward a fundraising goal, while also continuing to practice using rate tables for unit rate problems. Next week, we will be going back to our amazing explorations of Fibonacci's sequence nature to create Fibonacci trees that explain the patterns of growth in nature.

In these weeks, we are focused on Mathematical Practice #4: Modeling with Mathematics.

SOCIAL STUDIES: We are finishing up an introductory unit on economics and the stock market, with an eye toward buying our first stocks in the StockMarketGame. This game will last for the entire school year, with students making decisions on how to invest a $100,000 (not real money, obviously!) in an informed, responsible way. As we chart and study our progress throughout the year, with new investments every week or two, we will get a better sense for how the economy is so connected to our complex world, from current events to political forces, global forces, and local trends. We will also be competing against teams from all over the city and state to see who do the most with their investments.

Coming up this week is an exciting unit about the beginnings of Human Higration from Africa to the rest of the continents, including studies about the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia 12,000 years ago as the agricultural revolution ushered out the hunter and gatherer societies. For this we will be studying resources from the Genographic Project from National Geographic: a project that aims to map our human lineage back tens of thousands of years through genetic mapping. We will be use that as a starting point for studying ancient artifacts and climate data and writing about whether the development of agriculture was good for humans (the answer would seem obvious, but maybe there's more to this than you think!).