Beatrice and Anushka's Weekly Update...

Hello, and welcome to this week’s Weekly Update, brought to you by the amazing Anushka and the brilliant Beatrice! This was a very important week for all of us for several reasons. We will be telling you about our interesting talk with Mr. Robertaccio, the sixth grade counselor, the new unit in puzzles, geometry and lastly our Social Studies’ presentations. Now sit back, relax and read on about our fun week. Remember when you went from second grade to third grade (if you already have)? That is what will be happening to us soon, except we are going from 5th grade to 6th grade. There were many different reactions to moving up into sixth grade. Some things that some kids said were.... “I’m sorta excited but at the same time nervous” ,“I am dreading it” ,“I am super super excited” and “I am so scared”. To give us a bit more information, (and to help calm down on the stress) Mr. Robertaccio, the counselor for 6th grade, came down to talk to us. He talked to us about electives, homebase, middle school lockers, rules, and other such things that kids tend to worry about. We will only be giving you a short summary about the talk, but in case you would like to know more, click this link to find out more about it. To begin with, he started with classes. We would have homeroom for 18 minutes (strange number right?), and then have our school core classes (like RLA, math, history, etc) which were 83 minutes (even stranger number). At the end of the day, we had either an elective/music and World language. In world language, we got to choose from the languages of Spanish, Chinese and the new one of French! If we chose to have music (band, strings or choir), we could have the three choices from these electives: movement, art, cooking, strategic learning, drama, IT, video and tech. If we didn’t take music, then we could choose six electives. Mr. Robertaccio then talked about teachers and not only how nice they were but were chosen especially for sixth grade since the kids will probably be quite nervous. The rules didn’t take very long and they were normal rules anyways. Everything else was about the schedule, timing and having some fun. Even though some kids think they dread it, everyone must be excited about 6th grade.

What did the acorn say when he grew into a big oak tree? Here’s a hint, it is the unit we are doing in puzzles. He said... geometry (gee I’m a tree)! Do you prefer numbers, algebra or shapes? Either way, we all agree that this is going to be an interesting unit in puzzles! Geometry is all about shapes! Although some people are having a few problems, it seems like we will all learn a lot from this unit. Some things that we have learned so far are about solids, views of solids, using objects to solve a simpler problem, and models of volume, we will now continue to learn about volumes. For those of you who are struggling with geometry, you can go to IXL and practice in the geometry section B.23-27. On Thursday in puzzles, Mrs. Clayton had us find the volume of the classroom, after we learned the formulas for finding the area in cubic units. The class picked up on volume quite quickly. Here is how you can find volume; width=w, height=h, length=l. You then multiply them together. This is a very short unit, which has only seven lessons, and we are going to learn as much as we can from our brilliant teacher Mrs. Clayton!

Moving on to our social studies presentation. Before we begin talking about the presentation, here is a quick pop quiz to see what you know. Question 1: What is the historical significance that the cenotaph has on singapore? Question 2: Why is the Civilian War Memorial located where it is? Question 3: Who founded Raffles hotel? If you had no clue what the answer is to any of these, then you now know a little bit of what we will all be learning from each other. There are many different sites that we will be learning about during the month of May. Some of them are old and some of them are newer. Confused? Every individual student will be making a presentation (except for one person who is doing a timeline)  about a different historical site in Singapore. This way, the class will learn about 21 different sites (not including their own). We are working very hard on our presentations and at the moment, we are putting information about our sites into our slides. There are many different ideas about how to set it all up. People are excited, nervous and both of them too. May is getting closer and closer, and soon we will finally be able to present!

These were only three things from our fantastic week, but they were the best moments. Thanks to Mr. Robertaccio, we know a lot more about sixth grade (this helps us to not be so nervous. It is a big transition and many are stressing about it), and everyone must be very excited. It was interesting to learn all about 3D shapes for math and prepare for our big-part-of-grade social studies presentation. This is the end of this week’s Weekly Update (Well, almost. In 34 words it will be over), but please do come back next week with the anticipation to learn about it from the amazing Alex and the perfect Preston! Hope you have a really “good” Good Friday and a great weekend!