Dear Parents,
We are finishing our reading of Othello today. We will have an exam sometime next week and perhaps play a game of Othello Jeopardy. After that, we will begin reading Alice Siebold’s The Lovely Bones as I’ve received consent from each of you to move forward with the book. We also plan on getting back to our research papers. If possible, please allow your children to bring a laptop (along with a charger) to school on a daily basis so that we can complete our research. If you do not have a laptop available, you need not worry as we will find a Chrome Book for them to use
In Social Studies this week we commemorated the 75th anniversary of liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration camp by viewing a 15-minute documentary which provided footage of the liberation, along with first-hand witness accounts. The documentary also dealt with the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald as well. We also pointed out that while the Nazi atrocities were some of the worst in recorded history, our side committed atrocities as well. As an example we examined the fire-bombing happened in Dresden, Germany on the evenings of February 13, 1945 and February 14, 1945 in which United States and British bombers killed 25,000 people – most of them civilians. The Dresden bombing has been viewed by most historians as unnecessary because the war in Europe had essentially already been won and the city of Dresden was an arts center that held no strategic significance.
We also continued working on latitude and longitude. After exploring major cities in Asia last week we looked at the following cities in South America:
- Santiago, Chile
- La Paz, Bolivia
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Bogota, Colombia
- Montevideo, Uruguay
- Asuncion, Paraguay
- Sucre, Bolivia
- Caracas, Venezuela
- Quito, Ecuador
- Lima, Peru
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Rio de Janeiro
- San Jose, Costa Rico
- Managua, Nicaragua
- Georgetown, Guyana
In Science we learned about plasma and used a plasma ball to learn about the conductivity of electricity. Our investigation included the following questions:
- What is plasma?
- What are conductors of electricity?
- Why does the plasma ball light up when touched?
- How is the fluorescent tube lit up when held near the plasma ball?
- Why must you stand on a chair to light the fluorescent tube?
- What does it mean to be “grounded?”
In Math, we looked into the metric system and exponents. Specifically, we learned that when going from a larger unit of measure to a smaller unit we multiply and when converting a smaller unit of measure to a larger unit we divide. In particular, we looked at converting the following units of measure:
- Millimeters
- Centimeters
- Decimeters
- Meters
Thanks once again for all your support. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at: michael_flynn@platoacademy.org
Dr. Michael