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Health & Fitness

What's Happening at Our School?

Teachers at Wauwatosa Catholic School describe what's happening in class

Our school students have been busy!  Here is a snapshop of a few activities happening within the classrooms at Wauwatosa Catholic School.  For more details, please visit our class pages on the school website:  http://www.wauwatosacatholic.org and click "School Staff."

3 Year Old Kindergarten (K3)

The K3 students are taking their first step toward learning to read-letter recognition.  They are also learning a famous artist for each letter and discussing a work of art by each artist.

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4 Year Old Kindergarten (K4)

The K4 class has been busy learning the letters of the alphabet and the corresponding letter sounds.  They are up to the letter W!  While listening to stories, the students have been learning how to make connections, ask questions, visualize story events, and dig for important details.  In math, the students have been making patterns and were introduced to the concept of graphing.  For their year-long IB unit, the children continue to look at how different families around the world celebrate different holidays.  On Ash Wednesday, the students were excited to attend their first All-School Mass, and we will continue to attend the weekly school Mass through the end of the school year.  

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5 Year Old Kindergarten (K5)  

During the month of February, the K5 class was busy with Groundhog's Day, Valentine's Day, and the 100th Day of School activities.  They also worked on counting, comparing, and writing numbers.  Students have learned two new sight words every week, and they have been reading and writing.  The K5's finished their first IB unit on community helpers and built a model of a community within the classroom!

1st Grade

In February, first grade was busy!  While writing, students have been learning how to write different kinds of letters; friendly, persuasive, and informative.  In reading, students have been doing a lot of story mapping to help them understand the stories and what makes them interesting. During math time, we finished up a Geometry unit.  They now know all about their 3D shapes as well as symmetry, fractions of a whole, and probability.  Wow!  Our latest IB unit is called "What's the Matter?" which explains how our world works.

2nd Grade 

With lots of practice, the second graders leanred how to regroup when adding two-digit numbers.  They have learned all of the lowercase letters in cursive, and they are now learning the cursive form of the uppercase letters as well.  The students also began preparation for First Holy Communion.  Please keep us in your prayers.  To see pictures, please visit our class website:  http://www.wauwatosacatholic.org

3rd Grade

The third grade students have learned the relationship between their multiplication facts and division facts.  They have studied how a reference source such as a thesaurus can give synonyms for overused, boring words and transform their writing to make it more interesting and exciting.  Plus, they had practed test taking strategies in preparation for the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills which are now complete!

4th Grade

In fourth grade, students are culminating the "Sharing the Planet" IB unit which requires investigations of energy.  Fourth graders are also focused on persuasive writing which they are excited to include in their Fourth Grade Newspaper.

5th Grade

In the fifth grade, students started their third IB Unit:  How We Organize Ourselves, learning about the structure of the U.S. government and their rights and responsibilities as citizens.  The fifth graders will be investigating various types of government around the world to compare and contrast what they have studied.  Participation in a Jerry Spinelli Book Club featuring Loser, Maniac Magee, and Crash has also been a key area of study.

Middle School Religion

The sixth graders engaged themselves in reading a variety of books of the Bible, Psalms, Prophets, parables, etc.  Students created stories in poem, narrative, and parable form from those lessons.

Seventh and eighth graders walked through history of the Catholic Church and created posters highlighting important events such as the Christian persecutions, Crusades, Martin Luther, to name a few.

Middle School Math

The sixth graders have been practicing using ratios, rates, and proportions.  They have applied this knowledge in map reading and scale drawings.

Seventh graders are exhibiting growth and proficiency in practical application of algebraic expressions, combining like terms, and writing out equations for word problems to solve for missing values.

Eighth grade students are working with inequalities, including graphing them and solving them for a missing variable through multiplication and division.  To top it off, they are tackling solving compound inequalities with vocabulary such as "and" and "or" and graphing these on a number line as well.  Students are becoming well-versed at finding ranges for word problems by solving inequalities.

Middle School English/Language Arts

The sixth grade students just finished up a novel study on Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game.  During the unit, students dissected the many facets of friendship, learned to draw inferences, and make connections from the text to their lives.  We are currently in the drafting stage with our memoirs about a special place.  Students are using sensory details, dialogue, and figurative language to "hit these memoirs out of the ballpark."

Seventh grade has finished S.E. Hinton's classic, The Outsiders, which is vital to every midddle-school adolescent.  We've interpreted how the story could be different if it were told from a different perspective.  We have also carried out a deep analysis of stereotyping and its effects.  We are also working on memoirs about a special person in our lives.  Using the novel-which is written like a memoir- as a model, we are nearing the publishing stage of the writing process.  These memoirs are destined to be a huge success!

Eighth grade students are currently in the middle of Lois Lowry's post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, Gathering Blue.  In this unit, students are making connections between the foreign world in the story to our modern world.  We have also investigated Catholic Social Teaching and will begin discussing how we need to share our gifts to live our Catholic Social Teaching-not just discuss it.  To top off a busy spring semester thus far, students are toward the end of an advertising unit where they will be making commercial and print advertisements.

Middle School Science

The sixth graders have been testing effects of weathering and erosion.  We tested the soil outside of our school building to see what nutrients it has as well as what type of soil it is.

In the seventh grade, students have been playing with diffusion.  We diffused gummi bears with water and then diffused the water out using a saturated salt solution.  We also have been observing osmosis in cells.  We dissolved the shell of eggs and then used osmosis to bring water in as well as corn syrup to bring it out.

The eighth graders have been learning about the atom and nuclear power.  The students researched the pros and cons of nuclear energy.  We examined the effects of Chernobyl and the recent nuclear issues in Japan.

Middle School Social Studies

In sixth grade, we have been comparing and contrasting ancient China and India.  Students learned about two major world religions:  Buddhism and Hinduism.  They created a display on the beliefs of those religions.  They also have been learning about the Chinese dynasties.  We created an ink water color based on the art of Tao Chi.

In seventh grade, students have finished their explorers unit in which they researched a variety of explorers.  Biocubes were created for each figure with a map to display learnings.  We also looked at the IB learner quality that each explorer exemplified.

In eighth grade, students are busy diving into the history surrounding World War Two.  The students have been discussing the impact of war.  They participated in a rationing activity in which using ration points to plan a grocery list was a sobering moment.  They have been learning to identify propaganda.  They are using primary sources to create a propaganda video.

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