Week of May 7

⅞ New York City Field Trip Reminders

• We are asking that the final payment and the permission slip/medical form for the NYC trip be brought to school by Friday, May 17th. Checks should be made out to Williston Central School.  If you need more time or financial support (some scholarship support is available), please do not hesitate to let us know.   Cost is $255 for students and the same for chaperones.  See the letter/itinerary for details.  Contact Aron Merrill - amerrill@cssu.org or Lauren Wesnak lwesnak@cssu.org  if you have any questions.

• If you have volunteered to be a chaperone, there is a field trip meeting scheduled for Tuesday, May 21st @ 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.  All students going on the field trip will have a similar meeting during the school day.

Pictures of the 5/6 Science Day in the Field

We apologize for not highlighting the wonderfulness students presented last week on their day of tree planting and ecological investigations at the Winooski delta.  Enjoy the photos below!

This Week in Ms. O’s Class

Math 5

Thank you to parents who joined up for the Tour of Learning.  If you enjoyed this opportunity please let you core teacher know and we will try to make that happen more regularly next year.

I’m so proud of so many students who took the fluency challenge seriously!  The 5th graders have made huge progress.  I will report those scores so that we can all enjoy and celebrate the success and efforts of these students!  There is always work to do…Keep up the 4x a week efforts on      

Students have just finished a quick quiz on equivalent fractions and addition and subtraction of fractions.  Our new mathematical adventures include renaming fractions as decimals and adding and subtracting them.

Math 6

Thank you to parents who joined up for the Tour of Learning.  If you enjoyed this opportunity please let you core teacher know and we will try to make that happen more regularly next year.

We began work on division of fractions by looking at problems like 12 divide 1/3, 12 divide 2/3, 12 divide 5/3 to ask questions like, what is similar?  How will the resulting quotient compare?  Students will be playing with multiple strategies for division that will move them again, towards a generalization.

Fluency scores were up for 3rd trimester, but many still need the practice of FASTT Math and flashcards.  Don’t discount the value of an app or a five minute practice each day.  I hope that 6th graders move to Ms. Q with competency in math fluency.

Science 5/6

Students finished up podcast scripts this weekend and will be recording them next week.  Most are in good shape and ready to go!  Students are reviewing for a final assessment on the Solar System concepts including gravity, moon phases, solar and lunar eclipses, and why the sun and moon appear to be the same size in the sky.

Please enjoy the photos from our trips last week!

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up

⅚ Language Arts and Social Studies

This week each grade started an in class read aloud.  The 5th graders will be reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and the 6th graders will be reading Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.  Each class will be journaling and using their reading response notebooks throughout the read aloud, working on reading comprehension and vocabulary skills as we go.   

In Social Studies, students started working on word maps.  Students take a word related to the topic of study (economics), and map out the word, often finding many connections along the way.  Maps include definitions, facts, examples, sentences and visuals.  We will use these words to create skits and find deeper meaning and connections with all of our vocabulary for this unit.  

This week we say a fond farewell  to our graduate intern Ms. Cooper.  Over the year she has become an integral part of our teaching team.   Ms. Cooper has made meaningful connections with our students and shared her fun and witty personality with all of us. We wish her  well in her future educational ventures!

Math 7

We began this week with our new CMP unit “Data Distributions”  This book investigates measures of center, various statistical representations and the concepts of variability.  The 7th graders explored mean, median, mode,  line plots and value ordered bar graphs this week.. We looked at an assortment of  data it see if it was clustered or spread apart.   We talked about human error in recording data and the Law of Large Numbers.

Math 8

This week we continued our explorations in our “Looking for Pythagoras” unit.  Students reviewed concepts of square roots and utilized  their estimating  skills to find the square roots of non-perfect squares.  We investigated finding the area of a circle within a square and finding the area of squares that are on the diagonal.   All these examples help demonstrate how and why the Pythagorean theorem is used.

Science 7th/8th

We completed our presentations of our alien postcards.  We have found the more we study space, the more questions come up.  We began watching the Nova series on “Origins” to answer the question: What conditions were needed to form life on our planet?  Next week 8th graders will be participating in the Science NECAP test.  Tuesday we will have two session and Wednesday we will complete the assessment.  8th graders will need to get a good night sleep, have water and a good book for when they are done.  Snacks will be provided.  

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room

First off, I just want to say how AMAZING the “Annie” show was! It was so wonderful to see so many of our Voyager students put on such a beautiful and fun performance. Best of luck to them over the weekend!!

7/8 Language Arts: This week in Language Arts we started off with our Independent Reading Monday for 7th graders, and the 8th graders had a work day for their 8th Grade Challenge projects. We also took some time to work on our Business Convention projects. Students were able to brainstorm with each other and teachers, and get a great amount of work done. We then got back into our routine with journal writing and wrote in a variety of ways, with various time limits. As the week came to a close we showcased our PhotoStory memoirs and had a bit of fun with vocabulary through playing the game “Zip”.

7/8 Social Studies: This week we had our first run with Silver-Lining News on Monday and then jumped right back into our economics unit. We began building up our knowledge of our economic vocabulary and also watched more CNN Student News coverage due to their stories on our country’s current economic status. Students were given multiple class periods to work on their vocabulary maps, and these will be their final vocabulary maps of the year! We finished up the week by learning about “supply and demand” through a brief video and interactive quiz.

I also just want to take a second to say how AMAZING the “Annie” show was! It was so wonderful to see so many of our Voyager students put on such a beautiful and fun performance. Best of luck to them over the weekend and congratulations on such a wonderful show!