Week of April 29

Voyager House Spring Showcase!

Next Friday May 10th Voyager will be opening our doors to you, our Voyager families! Our students have been doing such amazing work over the course of this year that it is time share what has been going on in our classrooms. Between 8:30 and 9:30 families are invited to take a walk through Voyager and take a look at some of our projects. We will have coffee and juice available. Be sure to bring headphones to plug into our computers because some of our projects include audio :).

Looking forward to seeing you!

-Voyager Teachers and Staff

⅞ New York City Field Trip

Final cost letters with an attached itinerary were sent home with students today.   Please review the letter and itinerary this weekend.  Packing lists, evening activity schedule and other information will be coming home in the next few weeks.  Final payment for the trip will be due on Friday, May 17th.  

• The parent chaperone meeting has been rescheduled for Tuesday, May 21st at 6:30pm.  We ask that all chaperones attend this meeting so that we may discuss chaperone responsibilities, student behavior expectations, communication, packing lists, academic responsibilities and the final itinerary.  The meeting will be held in the Voyager Kiva.  Parents are welcome to attend.  

Ms. Q’s Corner

Math 7

This week students finished constructing cylinders.  We compared and contrasted the volume and surface area of cylinders with rectangular and triangular prisms.  Practicing with circumference, area,  and volume, students performed multi-step problems.  We finished the week with our unit assessment.

Math 8

We said a fond farewell to quadratic equations with the unit assessment for Frogs, Fleas, and Painted Cubes.  Students have become confident using visual models and equations to write factored and expanded forms of quadratic functions. At the end of the week we moved on to a new unit, Looking for Pythagoras, exploring the Pythagorean theorem.

Science 7th/8th

We began our review for the upcoming science NECAP by looking at some released questions and considering them as a class.  We discussed what the questions are asking for, and how to eliminate incorrect answers.  We focused on the bolded words like "most likely" and "best", and paying close attention to information presented in diagrams. Students worked as table teams, came to a consensus on the answer, but also had to defend why they eliminated the other answers.  

Students have been working diligently on their postcards from space.  We have learned a lot such as where our solar system is located in the galaxy, how scientists collect data about the atmosphere of exoplanets, and how far a light year is in miles.  We are realizing that space is a very vast place and there are a lot of mysteries to solve. Each student will share one postcard of a place they visited in the Milky Way on Monday.

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Language Arts:

This week we tuned in to the advertising world. We talked about popular brands and how or why they became so popular. We talked about target audiences and how brands and businesses draw in their target audience, and why that audience may have been chosen in the first place. Our classes also analyzed a series of commercials ranging from Nike to AT&T to Best Buy and Kia to see what kind of marketing and advertising techniques or strategies they were using to draw in their audience and target audience. Finally we ended the week talking about slogans. Students were put to the test to try and match brands with their slogans in a classwide challenge! We found ourselves singing along with the slogans and jingles from Folgers, McDonalds, and Maybelline. So, we asked ourselves do slogans work? Does marketing and advertising work? Our thoughts after today: YES!

7/8 Social Studies

This week Social Studies started off with watching CNN Student News. With everything going on in our world lately, this week’s news had bit more thought-provoking and heavier feeling news than past weeks. As a 7th and 8th grade community we decided that we need more happy news than sad news to start off our week, so made a pact from now until the end of the year to bring in “Silver-lining News” every Monday for current events. Students are being asked to bring in and be willing to share 1 piece of “Silver-Lining New” every Monday. This news can be personal, town-wide, state-wide, country-wide, or global. As our week progressed we picked back up with our economics unit, starting by learning about money and what kids should do with it! We learned that according to financial specialists kids should do 4 things with their money: Save, Invest, Donate, and Spend. Students were asked what they would spend their money on and then started watching the movie “The Story of Stuff” where they learned about what the United States has been doing with their money. Our guiding question has been how does the economy impact our environment and people? Through “The Story of Stuff”, class conversations, brainstorms, a few in-class readings, and a homework assignment titled “What’s in your closet?” we learned about the basics of how our economy works, how the economy impacts our local environment, global environment, and citizens of our world. We also learned about what we can do to help inspire and create change so our economic system can continue without harm to ourselves, our happiness, and our world.

News from Ms. O

Math 5

We are wrapping up our 2 week work on fractions and heading towards an assessment that gives students feedback on their understanding of equivalent fractions and addition and subtraction of fractions.  Students have been leaning on models to do this and learning that these models allow us to understand equivalence and the putting together or taking away with fractions.  The key is to get to a generalization that can work every time. This is the number model algorithm:  when we add fractions with a similar denominator, the sum keeps the denominator and the numerators get added.  When the denominators are different, we must rename (or find an equivalent fraction) the fractions, so that they do have the same denominators.  Then we can add numerators and keep the same denominators.  The same process works for subtraction.

Next stop..decimals and the relationship we can make between decimals and fractions.

Math 6

We have been working on building understanding of fraction of fraction problems and the relationship between them and the operation of multiplication.  Students are finding skills like:  changing improper fractions to mixed numbers (and the reverse), renaming fractions so that they have common denominators (which brings us right back to factors and multiples), adding and subtracting fractions and multiplying them too!  I have been making a point to talk to students about the little fractions of points they lose on assessments for not adding labels to models, units to numbers, stating solutions in the context of the problem, reading carefully when thinking about the question and what is being asked.  This kind of careful attention to the details, makes a mathematician!  I hope that they continue to see that every day and every moment of learning is context for doing everything you can to show and explain.  I’m sure this will translate home too, when beds are made and the dishes are clean after dinner!  The details…

Science 5/6

Scientists lean on models to help them understand scientific phenomena that involve large numbers! We have models for molecules and models for anatomy and we also use models to understand the solar system!  Models have their limitations, but they can help students understand science!  Students have been watching things happen in Earth’s day and night skies forever, but when asking to explain??? Geesh, this is hard.  We are excited to show you next week, just what we know about the relationship between the Earth, Moon, and Sun in terms of the forces that act on them, their related motion, and gravity’s influence on them.  Day and Night?  Moon Phases? Eclipses? Seasons?  Tides? All due to big scientific and math principles like force and motion, mass, distance, and time!  

Our field trip was awesome.  Students planted 250 trees and shrubs along the Allenbrook and learned about the Winooski River and Lake Champlain.  It was fun watching the thrill of a student jumping for joy when a common tern dove for a fish, having students tell me that they couldn’t believe how much there is to see in a drop of water from a wetland, and the feel of joy after planting so many trees.

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up

Language Arts 5/6

This week in Language Arts students continued to edit their science research papers.  Students shared their papers on a google doc with Ms. O’Brien and Mr. Merrill.  Students opened their google doc papers on Tuesday to find comments and suggestions for their papers.  We also had a peer editing read aloud activity on Friday.  Students worked with a partner and read their partner’s paper out loud.  Students listened and looked for flow and organizational problems.  Final drafts were due today, and were to include a bibliography and a title page.  

Social Studies 5/6

In Social Studies, we started our economics study by considering the “four uses of money” and how kids can learn to make good financial decisions.  Students considered how they currently use money and brainstormed ideas for putting money to work in their lives.  We then took a look at the production process and its connection to environmental and social issues.  We considered and discussed both the benefits and the costs of making “stuff”.