Sixth Grade
May/June 2022
Instrumental Music 6 (Introductory and Advanced): Sixth-grade instrumental students will continue working on building their music literacy and ensemble skills. Our class focuses these next two months will be on chorals and choral playing, where each section of the ensemble will carry the melody and harmony together. Listening to one another and matching articulation and phrasing are the key takeaways from this time. We will be using these skills to prepare for a performance set towards the end of the year!
Acting 6: Sixth-grade theatre students are working on two performance projects during April and May. The first is called Page to Stage. Working in small groups, students choose a favorite children’s book to convert into a play with dialogue rather than narration. After writing a script, they will block and rehearse and finally perform. The performances will be filmed and shared with first graders in the lower school. The second project is a monologue of their choosing that they will prepare, memorize, develop a strong character, and perform solo.
Vocal Music 6: Sixth Grade choir students will continue to focus on music theory and also on vocal technique. We are exploring essential questions about these fields of music. Lots of how’s and why’s. As always, students strive to become better vocal musicians by building sight-reading skills and singing a wide variety of repertoire including some historical music, some folk songs, and some music in other languages. In April students will study the poetry of their choir music and dissect the text. In May students will observe Jewish/American Heritage by singing music in Hebrew and discuss why this culture’s music is important to choir.
Art 6: Sixth-grade artists are completing work on their handmade sketchbooks. They have designed covers and are learning basic book-making techniques to create a completely unique book for their work in class. Students will begin thinking about lettering and design, then practice drawing animals by seeing shapes (construction) and developing designs for original comic characters.
PE 6: Sixth-grade PE students are currently in the middle of some intense badminton games. From drop shots to smashes, the students are using the different shots of the game to move their opponents around on the court. Singles and doubles tournaments add to the fun and competitive part of the game. The week after MS Conferences, the students will have the opportunity to challenge themselves on the climbing wall at SPARC. This unit gives them the opportunity to step out of their comfort zone while also being very supportive classmates.
Health and Wellness 6: In class, we’ll have lessons on mental health and self-care strategies, followed by an end-of-semester project in which students dive deeper into a topic we have explored in class. The remainder of the year will be focused on community building and committing to personal challenges. All these activities will take place outside on the ropes challenge course.
Science 6: Sixth-grade scientists are knee-deep into science research! The students have been working on designing and refining their experiments and will now begin the most fun part of this process—conducting their experiments and engineering their designs. Students will work on the data collection process over the next few weeks, and then afterward students will begin to analyze and graph their data and finish writing their lab reports. Finally, students will practice presenting their research to a public audience to prepare to share their work with all of you during Science Research night in June.
French 6: In April, we wrap up our Fête de la Musique song playoffs. Ask your student which song their class picked! Our inquiry questions for this month include: How do I ask for what I need in French? How do my language and manners affect the way someone might see me in French culture? Students are learning different ways to talk about school supplies, shopping, and prices. Later this month, they will expand their communication skills by learning to describe school subjects and schedules, and how to tell time. They will tackle two more of the four major verbs: être and aller. We continue to build an understanding of nuanced grammar structures, like gender and number, which is called agreement. In the final stretch during May, students will build their vocabulary skills for places around town and how to ask specific questions. They’ll make cultural comparisons with what it’s like to go to school in France, and what school lunches are like in francophone countries. Also in May, we begin preparing for the oral interview, their final assessment in June. Throughout these months, we will learn new songs in French and play speaking games in class to deepen their understanding and skills.
Chinese 6: In Chinese 6 class, we started the food last month and finished the fruit lesson. Students made fruit rap songs as the final project and learned how to express likes and dislikes. This month, students will continue to learn about food: Western food and Chinese food. They will learn to indicate hunger and thirst and ask for food and drinks. Students will also inquire about a few typical Chinese dishes. For grammar pieces, students will be engaged in using 了 to indicate change, 去+verb, use tai to construct exclamatory sentences to indicate extremes, make suggestions with ba, and provide others with choices. For cultural immersion, we will discuss the role of food in Chinese society and also Western chains in China. Students will be working on a food board game as the final project.
Spanish 6: Currently, we are finishing Unit 4: El Hotel and TENER. In April we are working on Unit 5: Shopping! In addition to a lot of clothing-related shopping vocabulary, we are introducing another important irregular verb; IR = to go. Students will learn to use IR to also talk about what they are going to do in the near future. For culture, we will look at some differences in shopping and we will learn a bit about some types of currencies. One of our songs in this unit is “Vivir mi vida,” which helps reinforce the grammar component of IR + a + (verb). This shopping unit will also include a day of role-playing buying and selling items in a “market.”
Technology 6: Tech students have just finished their Augmented Reality projects. They were asked to identify a global or local issue to raise awareness on, and to create an interactive Augmented Reality artifact, using the CoSpaces MergeCube add-on. As a class, we then shared our creations with the other Tech rotation and developed our skills in providing effective critique and feedback to peers. We will soon begin work on Digital Citizenship and Internet Safety and apply the skills we have gained in CoSpaces to showcase this new knowledge. Ask your students to show you what they have been learning about and creating!
Pre-Algebra Prep 6: With fractions, decimals, properties, rates, ratios, and some algebraic foundations under their belts, these mathematicians are moving on to work with integers (positive and negative numbers). We will explore what integers are, how to compare them, work with all the operations and apply these concepts to fractions, decimals, and more of the distributive property and order of operations. The beauty of math is how it all builds on what came before. As we approach the end of the year, we will play with some statistical concepts while keeping all the skills they have learned fresh through warm-up problems. I encourage all students to use the multiplication and division facts resource banks and google forms in the classroom to really hone those important skills.
Pre-Algebra 6: For the next couple of months in PA, the students dive into solving one-step and multiple-step algebraic equations. They will be introduced to Inverse Operations as the method to solve the equations. During this unit, the students will work on translating word problems into algebraic equations, also. As the assessments become more challenging, the students will practice various study methods to prepare for the assessments as well as ways to edit their work before submitting it. I appreciate the efforts they display in showing organized work. This is especially important as the problems become more multi-stepped. The review of operations involving rational numbers is also a part of the coming lessons.
Humanities 6: In Humanities, we will be reading It’s Trevor Noah: Born a Crime, Stories from a South African Childhood. While we are reading, we will continue our annotation skills focusing specifically on the themes that emerge throughout the book. Through Trevor Noah’s thought-provoking, personal, and at times funny memoir, we will continue to examine the experience of being multi-racial. As we are exploring this memoir, we will take time to explore and unpack the history of South Africa’s apartheid and make connections to broader themes we have investigated this year including diversity and justice.