Week of January 21

Voyager Pet Food Warehouse Fundraiser
Pet Food Warehouse will donate $1 per transaction during the ENTIRE month of February to the WCS Voyager Field Trip Fund.  You must come in with the coupon....for every coupon they collect, we get $1 donation from that sale.  

If you come wash your dog on 2/9/13, Pet Food Warehouse will donate the ENTIRE fee ($12) to the Fund.  We need to be diligent about filling up every 'spot' for reservations.

Come in on 2/9/13 for the Voyager 'Love Your Pet' Bake Sale!

Voyager Dance - Friday, February 1st, 6:30 - 8:30 at WCS
We need parent volunteers to chaperone and help with concession sales.  We also need donations of snacks to sell and drinks.  All concession profits go to our house fund, we have to split the entrance feel with other houses.  Also needed are gifts for raffle.  
If any parents are interested in helping to come early and contribute to decorations, please let me know.

Our theme is 'Voyager Loves Pets' -- to kick off our month of fundraising with Pet Food Warehouse. Valentines theme, red tablecloths, hearts, etc.....
Here is link to wiki:
http://voyagerfap.wikispaces.com/home

Voyager Play
We will begin preparing for our play the week of March 18th. The performance night will be Thursday, April 4th.

Scripps National Spelling Bee Qualifying Test:  Wednesday, February 6th at 12:30 in the WCS Dining Room

The Scripps National Spelling Bee Qualifying Test is scheduled for 12:30 on Wednesday, February 6 in the WCS Dining Room. The highest scorer on this test will qualify to compete in the SCRIPPS State Spelling Competition scheduled forWednesday, March 13, 2012 at St. Michaels College. The individual champion of that state-wide competition will win an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., to represent Vermont and compete in the 2012 Scripps National Spelling Bee in May. Qualifying Test words will be taken from the Vermont Principal’s Association Grades 7/8 Spelling Word List which can be found at the bottom of the web page athttp://www.vpaonline.org/domain/42.  Copies of the list, along with passes to be released from the cafeteria (for those who need to buy a school lunch) can be found in the hanging pockets outside of the Enrichment classroom.  Students should plan to bring their lunches to the dining room that day.  We will eat and then take the test. Participating students will miss both lunch and recess that day.
Students do not need to sign up ahead of time.  Please contact Cris Milks with questions at cmilks@cssu.org or 879-5890.

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up
⅚ Language Arts: This week we started working on a poetry lesson that is connected to our historical fiction theme.  Using historical fiction sources, students explored the social and cultural issues of a character’s story and described the likely feelings and experiences of a person during the Revolutionary War.  From there we will learn to use figurative language to create moods, arouse expectations, and describe emotions to produce poetry.
Spelling/Vocabulary: Just a reminder that if your student is using a Wordly Wise 3000 book, he or she can access the website - http://www.wordlywise3000.com/ for games and additional instruction for each lesson.  

⅚ Social Studies: This week, students wrapped up our unit on the 3 Branches of Government with some review games and a quiz.  Mr. Eaton, the Clerk of Court at the U.S. District Court, was our guest speaker.  It was a great presentation with many fantastic questions.  Next week, we will begin our 18th century history unit.  Here is a history question to discuss/research over the weekend - what were the New Hampshire Grants?

Flynn Field Trip
FYI... the Flynn show - Flamenco Vivo was outstanding.  Ask your student about the performance!

Ms. Q's Corner
Math 7: It was with great chagrin that I realized a juice concentrate reference in our math book was not understood by the majority of the class.  My students are more familiar with juice out of a box and the reference of juice concentrate certainly threw the students for a loop.  Getting back to the math....students were asked to decide which juice recipe was juiciest based on the ratio or concentrate to water.  We also had to decide which dining room table we would sit at based on the number of pizzas placed on the table per person.  It certainly made us both hungry and thirsty.  We explored different ways to represent ratios, including part-to-part and part-to-whole.
 
Math 8: Elimination, combination, substitution oh my, elimination, combination, substitution oh my!  This week we practiced and practiced different methods of finding a solution set for a system of equations.  We needed to draw upon our skills with balancing equations to help us through finding the point of intersection of two lines.  We reviewed for our Shapes of Algebra test by solving and graphing inequalities, and writing different forms of linear equations. Our unit test began on Friday.

Science 7/8th: The week began with revisiting a science misconception that was clearly discussed in the majority of the Koke Chiller science experiments. The underlying science question: How does heat move?  Many students stated that the cold travels into the room temperature water making it cold.  Students performed a simple experiment where they placed a room temperature beaker into a beaker of cold water with with the same volume of water.  Over time, they recorded the change in temperature on the inside and outside beaker.  They observed that the temperature of the room temperature water decreased and the temperature of the cold water increased.  Eventually the beakers of water became the same temperature and thermal equilibrium was established.  I asked students to write one paragraph about this science concept in order to dispel our scientific misconceptions.  This week also began the preliminary search for science fair partners and questions.

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room
First, I’d just like to say how nice it is to be back in Voyager!
 
Language Arts 7/8: This week 7th and 8th graders wrapped up their work on their Eyewitness to History Interviews. Our students interviewed a wide range of people, and we really can’t thank everyone enough for taking the time to work with us, tell your stories, and share your experiences. A GREAT number of students are submitting their interviews to Jr. Scholastic Magazine. Jr. Scholastic Magazine is running a contest for students to submit their Eyewitness to History Interviews to win a prize of $250, along with their interview being published in a Spring issue of the magazine! Wow! They will also be rewarding 2 second place winners with a $100 prize. Cross your fingers for a win! Once we all felt caught up and had completed our interviews we started learning about memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies. We are getting into our narrative unit, and we will be using stories from the second World War as our examples. Students will be reading a number of short biographies and memoirs from the time period, so Social Studies and Language Arts will once again be very integrated!
 
Social Studies 7/8: Voyager did some amazing work researching and learning about WWI while I was away. I heard their 5 W’s projects were fantastic and from what I saw earlier this week, students learned a lot! After we wrapped up our learning from WWI we flowed right into the second World War, which will be our focus for the coming weeks. We will be learning some key vocabulary terms, the geography and how much of the world this war took over, along with the timing of the various events that happened during World War Two. Please take some time to talk to your kids about this time period in our history.

News from Ms. O
Math 5:  The focus of our week has been angles. How do we describe an angle, how do we measure them and how are they created and related when lines intersect.  It has been interesting holding back the information on how to use a protractor.  When students use what they already know about pattern blocks and angle relationships to find the measure of an angle, they can then see how the protractor can be used to confirm that measure.    We will be having frequent quizzes on geometry language to help commit some of it to memory.  Geometry is a math discipline filled with language. I have been encouraging each student to make statements that  include the descriptive language of geometry.  This is intentional and designed to enhance the long term memorization of these terms.
 
Math 6: We wrapped up our unit on positive and negative numbers this week with an assessment and moved quickly into RATIOS!  We had a little lemonade testing today, thinking about what makes each sample of lemonade the lemony-EST!  Students made predictions based on this taste testing and then we got right to the math, looking at the ratios of mix to water.  Our taste buds didn’t tell the whole story, as students found that they could use unit rate to compare one ratio to another.  Some groups were close, getting three out of 5 samples in the correct order on the scale from least to most lemony!  We had a lemon good time!  We will spend perhaps two more weeks on this idea and then move into geometry!  Didn’t I say that the last time??  I changed the plan, given the opportunities to make real the ratio idea!

⅚ Science:  Students are preparing for a roller coaster event! On Monday, groups will design a roller coaster that fulfills certain design and engineering constraints and incorporates understanding of  the science ideas of kinetic and gravitational potential energy.  We are having a lot of fun.  We are participating in the E-week with IBM and are working to schedule some time with them before February break.  I will let you all know when that is happening, so you can join us if you like! Looking forward to roller coaster MONDAY!  Should be fun.