August 15-18
Parent(s), welcome to RMS! I look forward to getting to know you! Middle school is a new world, vastly different from elementary school. There is far more freedom; a greater number of peers who can influence your son or daughter to make good and/or bad decisions; numerous teachers and the sheer size of the campus. Physically, they’ll experience the many changes going on inside their bodies, causing you to wonder if he/she has been abducted by aliens because they’re acting weird, i.e. mood swings, the quality of work is up and down, argumentative, friends become more important, etc. Don’t panic. This is the life of a ‘tweener.’ It’s a phase you may remember growing up and it’ll pass. As a parent, what will help you through this phase is to talk about life at Ridgeview; allow them to make decisions and fail; and finally to be patient. A book my wife and I found to be helpful with rearing our children is called Parenting with Love and Logic by Jim Faye and Foster Cline.
Look forward to working alongside you in preparing your child for their future!
a bit about this unit:
We begin the year with a mini unit, safety in the lab and our first major unit, Ecosystems. The students will discover that an ecosystem is composed of two parts biotic and abiotic factors. They’ll learn how scientists have broken up an ecosystem into levels making it easier to study it: organisms, populations, community and finally the ecosystem. We’ll look a bit at the interactions of biotic and abiotic factors within an ecosystem.
goals:
This week and next, our goals are to introduce them to our core values and begin building good relationships that will hopefully lead to lifelong friendships.
activity: (what we do in class)
Tuesday – Friday: We’ll be learning the flow of how we do life in my classroom. Our primary goal the first week is to build community, learning about one another and how to CARE for each other, driven by our core values: character, accountability, relationships and excellence.
Homework:
- none
rozsascience 