Dear 7 Purple families,

We hope this newsletter finds you all well! As we prepare to welcome back all of our students, we wanted to give some tips and suggestions on how to make the transition to five days a safe and smooth one! We also are happy to briefly fill you in on what we’ve been doing in our classes since the start of Trimester 3!

One of most important things students can do to have a safe return is to wear a mask that fits properly. Our team has struggled with this recently. We’ve noticed a number of students, particularly in Cohort C, who are consistently wearing their masks below their nose. We completely understand that some students are having mask fatigue! It gets hard over the course of the school day! However, it is incredibly important more now than ever for students to wear their masks over both mouth and nose when returning to school five days a week. Our class sizes will now be 24, and desks will be 3 ft apart compared to what we currently have, which are class sizes ranging from 10 - 13 (depending on the cohort) and desks 6 ft apart! As you can see, things will be much different come April 28th!

It is also important to have students washing their cloth masks regularly and/or rotate them frequently, and change disposable ones daily! With allergy season in full swing, we’ve seen lots of sneezes and coughs in the masks! We’ve also seen some disposable masks pretty frayed and dirty. Washing and/or rotating cloth masks, or using new disposable masks daily makes them more effective and keeps kids healthy.

Mask and snack break will continue for the third trimester, but will now be held outside! We are asking for every student to bring in a beach or bath towel to sit on during the breaks. The towel should come in a labeled bag (plastic or paper), and it can be left at school for daily use.

Things to replenish over Vacation!
This year more than ever it is so important for students to have their own materials in class. While we do have classroom supplies, we need to disinfect them after student use and often don’t have enough to go around.  A number of students have run out of the following supplies:

• Pencils & pens
• Colored pencils
• Markers
• Earbuds / headphones

All of these items can be found at Dollar Tree, Walmart, Five Below, and Target. If they could be replenished prior to starting back five days, that’d be great!

 
Report Cards!
Report cards can be found in POWERSCHOOL. They went “live” on Tuesday, March 30th. Please be sure to check out your child’s report card if you haven’t already!

We also suggest you go into the Power School Parent Portal https://schools.shrewsburyma.gov/it/powerschoolparentportal to be sure all of your information (email, phone numbers, address) are up to date!!!  It is important to keep your email address up-to-date and “subscribed” to continue to get our newsletters and updates.

Course Updates

SCIENCE- Brianna Mondello
Hello 7 Purple Families! We are all looking forward to being back together as one team after Spring Break! In Science class, we will be wrapping up Natural Selection, Artificial Selection & Evolution in the weeks following April break.

Our final unit of the year will be Ecology. Ecology is a wonderful unit for spring time, as it offers many opportunities for outdoor learning. In May, we will be heading outside to play, “Oh Deer!”, a game that simulates how a population of deer changes over time due to the available resources in the habitat and limiting factors. We’ll also be watching clips of National Geographic’s Brown Bear “Critter Cam”;  a live video streaming that shows a 6 year old Brown Bear interacting with its environment. After witnessing first hand how the Brown Bear interacts with the living and non-living factors around him, the students will construct a food web to model the energy flow in the ecosystem. Following our work with food web models, students will be assessed on their understanding of using these scientific models, and constructing explanations of how energy flows and cycles through an ecosystem.
After studying the Brown Bear, we’ll learn about other ecological relationships, including symbiosis, competition, and predator-prey. In order to better understand these relationships, students will participate in several simulation games (all socially distanced of course!), empathizing with their assigned role in the food web. These games include a predator-prey freeze tag game, “Quick Frozen Critters”, the “Good Buddies” symbiosis card game, and a Fruit Loops competition game- “Let the games begin”. On the day of the Fruit Loops competition, the entire classroom is covered with Fruit Loops cereal in every visible place. Prior to the event, students are unaware of what each color loop represents, all they are told is that they need to gather as many fruit loops as possible to survive, and they have a limited amount of time. When I announce “Let the games begin!”,  I am always surprised by the competitiveness that this game brings out in each and every student! Stay tuned for an update with the photos of students competing for those loops and simulating ecological relationships.

MATH- Lindsay Ventura
Happy Spring! As we enter this final stretch of the school year, I am very excited to welcome both of our cohorts in-person together 5 days a week! The beginning part of T3 was a continuation of our unit on ratios and proportional reasoning that we ended T2 with. Students did such a fantastic job with this unit and I was blown away by how they did on the unit assessment! Once we return from April vacation, we will begin our next unit titled “Moving Straight Ahead” which will have a focus on tables, graphs, and equations. The first topic to be covered will be the constant of proportionality and how it can be represented in a table, graph, and equation. From there, we will transition to linear relationships which will be the primary focus of the unit.

As always, if you have any questions regarding the curriculum, please feel free to email me anytime at lventura@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us

SOCIAL STUDIES- Carey Davis
Greetings 7 Purple families! I am incredibly excited to have all of our students together at the end of the month! It will certainly be quite different than what we’ve been used to for the last year, but it will be wonderful to see our entire team engaged, to be whole again, and to have concrete routine at school.  

From March into April, students were busy creating their own lesson plans and became teachers for a day! They were asked to do research on a specifically assigned religion, which was our unit of study while in The Middle East/Southwest Asia. Their lessons included an Introduction activity, actual “teaching” to the class, and a Summarizing activity to review what we had learned. The lessons were very good, and I hope that students took away some new information and also an appreciation for various religions around the world. I think it is important for students to learn that within our community and global society we share more similarities than differences.

Once students return full time, we will begin our unit in Africa, studying how people adapt to living in a desert environment, endangered species of the continent, and potentially have time to learn about micro-entrepreneurship.

As always, if you have any questions for me, please feel free to contact me any time! If you also wish to be a guest speaker for any topics that we’re covering, we’d love to have you! Having a guest speaker via Zoom for 20 - 30 minutes is absolutely welcome!

Enjoy your vacation week!
Sincerely,
Carey Davis

LANGUAGE ARTS- Gabriela Belliveau
This month students have been hard at work becoming strong arguers! We have shifted gears from learning about how to navigate  and analyze literature to understanding the role of argumentative writing. As we shift into working with nonfiction, there will be a brush up on how to annotate properly, close reading strategies, and how to use nonfiction text features to comprehend what we read. Students have learned how to write a claim and use supporting evidence and reasoning to argue that claim. We as a team debated over the hot topic of homework and whether or not it is beneficial to student learning. Following the break, students will be engaging in a  research project where students will choose a topic and write a persuasive research paper to support their stance. This unit will test student knowledge or research skills and develop an understanding around how to cite sources properly.

LEARNING SKILLS - Ashley Poulin
It’s finally spring! We are very excited for the return to five days a week. I think for many students this will cause a positive impact on their third trimester. With the return to five days a week, we will be working on organizational skills, self advocacy and preparing for the MCAS.
 

Sincerely,
The 7 Purple Team Teachers
Brianna Mondello, Carey Davis, Lindsay Ventura, Gabriela Belliveau, and Ashley Poulin

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PARENT COMMUNICATION

Email:
We are all readily available by email. We check our email periodically throughout the day, but sometimes may not have enough time to send a thorough reply. Please allow up to 24 hours for a response, although we will almost always reply within the day your email was originally sent. If you have a question or concern, or if you want to make us aware of something that involves your child, please email your child’s homeroom teacher. If you want to email the team as a whole, you can also use the team email address at the bottom. Keep in mind that the email will go to all 5 of us.
 
Science: bmondello@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us
Language Arts:  gbelliveau@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us
Math: lventura@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us
Geography: cdavis@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us
Special Ed. & Co -Taught Educator:  apoulin@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us
7 Purple Team: 7purple@shrewsbury.k12.ma.us
 

Schoology:
Our team website is Schoology. This site (or app) is connected with PowerSchool. Your child is currently in one Group (7 Purple Team) and at least 4 Courses (Science, Geography, Math, and ELA). Your child’s Allied Arts or World Language teachers will likely have courses as well.
 
You can connect with your child’s Groups and Course so that you can see information such as assignments, due dates, test and quiz dates, field trips and spirit announcements.
 
SCHOOLOGY
To get connected to Schoology as a Parent:
*Do not go to Schoology.com!
 
*Go to this link https://schools.shrewsburyma.gov/it/schoology-parent-instructions

On the left click on “Account Creation Instructions”.
Once you are in you can look at any group or course your child belongs to. We recommend book-marking the link to Schoology, so that you have quick/easy access to it.
 
POWERSCHOOL
We also suggest you go into the Power School Parent Portal https://schools.shrewsburyma.gov/it/powerschoolparentportal to be sure all of your information (email, phone numbers, address) are up to date!!!  It is important to keep your email address up-to-date and “subscribed” to continue to get our newsletters and updates.

Upcoming events at OMS

• April 19 - 23 = School vacation week
• April 26th = Cohort B In-person, Cohort C Remote.
• April 27th = Cohort C In-person, Cohort B Remote.
• April 28th = Both cohorts begin together.
• May 19th = Math MCAS
• May 24th = ELA MCAS

Complete SPS District Calendar can be found HERE