Week of January 28

Watch for the Flash Mob!  

Tonight’s Dance Moves brought to you by Voyager Advisories!  

From the Desk of Kim Russ
We are finding that many emails are being returned to us because email addresses have changed.  Let’s freshen things up!   Could you please print and send in the quick contact form attached, so that we can change our records to reflect new contact information. Thanks!

Hi All!
My name is Tara Furey and I'm a senior at the University of Vermont, studying Middle Level Education.  I've been interning in Mr. Merrill's room for the past few weeks and I will be starting a unit on narrative writing in Language Arts next week.  I'm excited to be a part of such a great team and to see what we will accomplish!

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up
⅚ Language Arts
This week, students continued to work on their “Revolutionary” Poetry.  By focusing on our senses and feelings, students used comparisons to make the image in their poem more vivid.  We worked on finding more creative versions of ordinary words through self and peer editing and by using a thesaurus.   Students enjoyed replacing the “tired” adjectives and verbs with new found words.  Students will write a final version of the poem next week and will include illustrations and decorations with the poem.

⅚ Social Studies
This week we took a look at what Vermont was like before it became a state.  We talked about how this land once belonged to the Western Abenaki and what happened when they came into contact with Europeans.  We then read a story about Benning Wentworth and the first towns in what is now Vermont and how the land came to be known as the New Hampshire Grants.  We looked at a number of maps from the period to see how a conflict started between New York and the first Grant settlers.  We had a lot of fun reading and talking about the Green Mountain Boys and their fight to protect the Grants from the “Yorkers”.  Next week we will be exploring the answers to these questions - How do you start a town in a place you’ve never been before?  What natural resources are important for a town?




Ms Q’s Corner
7th Grade Math
Students explored unit rates using different scenarios from buying different types of calculators, comparing bicycle rates to purchasing CDs from different stores.  We  utilized a variety of strategies to solve these problems including  creating ratios, proportions and cross multiplying to find an unknown “x”.  Figuring out taxes on our purchases and forming an equation was found to be a bit challenging. ...but  we persevered!  We also delved into different types of unit rates, how they can be interpreted and what rate works best for a mathematical situation.  

8th Grade Math
A very cunning peasant from the Kindom of Monterek, asked for a kingly ransom after saving the king’s daughter.  The peasant asked the king for a chessboard where “rupas” doubled with each square.  This problem began our exploration of exponential growth in a unit is called “Growing, Growing, Growing”.  It will  promise to be a fun unit of investigating, graphing and solving exponential functions.  Students completed their “Shapes of Algebra” assessment at the beginning of the week. Students should be correcting tests and coming in for extra help where needed.  Algebra seminar students are preparing for the midterm that takes place on February 15th.  

7th/8th Grade Science
Students are forming their ideas for the science fair and have begun to get their testable questions written.  This year, students may choose from any genre of science for their topic, however the testable question needs to lead to good data.

This week was the culmination of our unit focusing on light.  Students worked in groups to investigate a question having to do with a natural phenomenon or technology involving light.  Using hands-on investigations and independent research, teams sought to become expert "luminaries" in their topic.  At the end of the week, students taught their peers what they had learned by presenting their demonstrations and leading a class discussion.

8th Grade Challenge
The Mid-year 8th Grade Challenge Sharing is just around the corner.  On February 21/22 8th graders will highlight their focus questions, what steps they have taken on their project, and what they plan to do for a community connection.  We look forward to seeing their Power points.

News from Ms. O
⅚ Science
We began our week with a marble roller coaster engineering design challenge to firm up our understanding of MECHANICAL energy!  It was loud in our classroom!  We had a flurry of activity as students moved through the CREATE and IMPROVE phases of the engineering design cycle.  The challenge, to make a roller coaster with at least one vertical loop to roll the marble from beginning to end the slowest, proved to be quite challenging. The winning group had a 7.5 second ride!  And the coaster was cool!  We spent a day analyzing the task talking specifically about what math, science, and technology they needed to consider in order to be a roller coaster engineer.  Interesting stuff!  Moving on to LIGHT energy and a circus to explore it!  Ask your Voyager about the Apple in the Dark probe.

Math 5
Angles, angles, angles. Congruence and symmetry.  An explosion of words in Math this week.  Students have been discovering some interesting relationships amongst intersecting lines and able to predict angle measures without a protractor given some minimal information.  Next stop...a focus on properties of geometric shapes and area and perimeter.

Math 6
Sixth graders have been working their way through a ratio and rate investigation that is building foundational understanding of proportional reasoning ( a fundamental concept in algebra).  Students have been dealing with problems that address real life situations and working to solve them using understanding of equivalent fractions and unit rate.  Our next studio day is Tuesday, so students will be on stage again to show how they learn mathematics.  I appreciate their constant flexibility with this!  It is a great opportunity for me and a showcase of their commitment to learning math.

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room
7/8 Language Arts:
This week we finished our reading of a short biography about Adolf Hitler. We held great discussions filled with questions, analysis, and overall fantastic connections between what students already knew about the holocaust/WWII era and what we are currently learning in Social Studies. After a few days of read aloud and journal writing we started to dig our heels into conjunctions. Asking questions such as: What are they? What do they do? and How do I use them? Students got the (oh so catchy) Schoolhouse Rock “Conjunction Junction” tune stuck in their heads, and we went to work on creating sentences using conjunctions in a variety of ways, along with identifying conjunctions in a short biography of Eva Braun, wife of Adolf Hitler.

7/8 Social Studies:
This week we have been getting serious about note-taking! Students have been working so hard and learning all about WWII. We are using a fantastic interactive map via history.com to take journeys across the globe, looking at WWII from the perspective of every continent that took part in this truly, world war. We travelled first to Europe and Africa. We learned about everything from D-Day to Panzer Tanks to the London Blitz. Leaving Europe after a few days visit, we just landed in North America. We will be kicking off next week learning about the draft and war propaganda from the time. I can’t stress enough how hard these students have been working! They are asking fantastic questions, digging deep into photos, videos, and audio clips. Please talk with your child about this time in our history because it is just filled with questions, stories, and information.