WEEKLY BULLETIN: GRADE 8 LEARNING SUPPORT

DECEMBER 14, 2011

INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL MANILA

This Week in Grade 8

ENGLISH Students are nishing up their nal performance task - a poetic scrapbook, consisting of their own creative poetry, favorite published poems, reections on poetry and the essays they have completed throughout the quarter. They have worked very hard over the past few weeks and have maintained their focus right through to the end of the semester. When we return in January students will be grouped into literature circles, focusing on reading novels, comprehension, and using metacognitive strategies while reading. SOCIAL STUDIES The students have completed their transformation expo performance task IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER:

researching current groups of people/countries that are in the midst of revolutions and reporting on those revolutions from the perspective of the people involved. The theme for quarter 3 will be Power.

of the lab report - the conclusion and evaluation. MATH

This week students took their second basic skills assessment and are in the introductory stage of their new unit on Statistics. SCIENCE Practice using their Our unit on Transformations calculators for statistics and and energy is just about creating scatter graphs is completed. Students have the current focus. This will been guided through the continue in January when process of writing a lab we return. report. The process was broken down into small units/tasks and Mr. Pasamba offered them much class time to work on their experiment and the report, guiding them each step of the way. Upon our return from holiday vacation, students will complete the nal portion

UPCOMING ASSESSMENTS & DUE DATES:

IMPORTANT WEBSITES USED IN CORE CLASSES: Google Docs

brainpop.com Noodle tools - research skills & notecards

Strategy Instruction Class

Skill & Strategy Areas of Focus: Vocabulary Development: - Developing strategies to help determine meaning of new vocabulary & expanding students vocabulary base - Using context clues - Categorizing/Classifying - Understanding words with Multiple Meanings - Prex & Sufx meanings using these to help determine word meaning - Root Words/Base words - for meaning The Writing Process: - Using editing checklists - Brainstorming - using templates or Inspiration to organize prior to writing - Identifying & Generating Topic Sentences, Compound Sentences (FANBOYS) - ordering paragraphs: placing sentence strips into proper paragraph order Research Strategies: - using templates to organize information - Noodle tools online - Paraphrasing skill practice Study Skills: - Note-taking strategies: we are using the Cornell method which is the 2 column notes method (main ideas on left side; supporting details on right) Time Management: - chunking long term/ large assignments into smaller due dates
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Study Skills Time Management Self - Advocacy Paragraph Writing Summary Writing Editing Strategies Interactive Reading Learning Styles

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