Grade 8 Learning Support Newsletter

International School Manila

Upcoming Important Dates ENGLISH

August 19, 2011

This Week in Grade 8 Unit: Systems

* New Parent Coffee Students completed individual Book Recommendation Posters explaining a Aug. 25 7:45am in the favorite book theyve read recently, designing a poster, and presenting to Little Theater. the class. They have also completed adapting the poem, Where Im From to fit their own experience. Short stories is the current unit beginning with * No School Holiday the story Charles by Shirley Jackson. 8.29 Monday SOCIAL STUDIES 8.30 Tuesday Every week, students complete a Read & Response assignment based on a current events articles of their choosing. They write a summary of the article and a personal response to it. This week they are working on Connections to the World assignment, exploring the influence of products from other countries in our lives, parents jobs and the Philippines.

Helpful Tips
* Planners are being used dont forget to remind your child to check and use their planner! * Check out our class blog! piercec.ism-online.org You can access all of your son/daughters core class blogs from my blog as well.

SCIENCE Students are finishing up the Digestive System. Focus is on the functions, behaviors, and interconnections between the parts of this system and eventually between other human systems. Experiments focusing on what happens in digestion were completed. QUIZ ON DIGESTION ON SECOND LESSON NEXT WEEK. Next week they will be introduced to the Circulatory and Respiratory System, while first looking at Lance Armstrong as a human machine. MATH Focus has been on the review of the order of operations in algebra problems, absolute value, and evaluating math problems. They will continue to practice the above concepts and then review for their first math assessment by creating a math problem riddle. MATH ASSESSMENT WILL BE ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2.

Strategy Instruction Class (SI)

The focus of SI class is on the development of skills that will assist students in their core classes, specifically, but overall will help them both in and out of the classroom. The most important one is SelfAdvocacy asking for help when they need it; understanding their personal learning styles will also be covered. Examples of skills we will focus on are sentence structure and paragraph writing, vocabulary development, summarizing skills, paraphrasing, identifying the main ideas and details, and inferring. Specific study skills will also be addressed such as note taking, creating study guides for tests, and overall time management in regards to homework completion, long term projects and assignments and personal commitments.