Review of First Week

First Week School Wide Workshops - Let's say that the first week was simply great. We started back on Tuesday, and the staff for each grade level guilt in Introductory, Back to School Workshops and Assemblies. 7th Grade students learned about the special and unique traits of the 7th grade staff the first day, followed up by a digital footprint presentation by Mr. Montes. During Wednesday and Thursday, the entire 7th grade was divided up into four groups. Each day students participated in a total of four half hour workshops about various topics to help students 1. get organized, 2. deal with stress, 3. understand how their personality affects their learning, and 4. understand how to work together in groups. On Friday, 7th graders met with their Advisory Teacher to pair up, have a discussion about various aspects of starting back to school this year, closing with writing a letter to their June 2018 future self about goals, meeting expectations about school, friends, and outside interests as well.

First Week of Instruction in LASS7. 
To accommodate the first week of workshops, Each class met for a brief 26 minutes introduction the first round of classes, followed by two 45 minutes periods of instruction the rest of the week.

Social Studies 7 - 
This week we participated in a set of compare and contrast activities about Summer vs. School, before writing a two paragraph writing sample for the classroom teacher to use as an informal assessment tool to see where each class is as writers to better help me teach appropriate lessons for each student.

We also examined different theories of history, using a list generated by the students. Then students were to then to ponder a hypothetical big bang type beginning of time that supposedly took place in 1963. Students used the notes on different theories, and some asked their parents in drafting a 5 point response. On the day of the "debate" with Mr. Rodgers defending the position, the entire class for each period was engaged in a debate with the teacher about the theory, using evidence to debunk the 1963 Big Bang theory with their own evidence and arguments.


Language Arts 7 - Since the Summer vs School paragraphs was one writing piece for all of my students, students in Language Arts were introduced to Journal Guidelines to be completed in their notebooks. Students wrote a journal in their Notebook for 12 minutes about Summer. Students next harvested 5 key parts of the piece that they liked or thought was most meaningful.