Week of December 16

Happy Holidays!  We had a great day!

• Thank you to all who brought in food for this mornings Voyager House Breakfast.  The students really appreciated it!!
• Stocking Stuffers?  Pencils, erasers, calculators!

Gingerbread Challenge

Look at these words of art!  Wow to our newest architects!

Field Trip

Voyager House will be heading to the Flynn Theater downtown Burlington Wednesday morning, January 8th.  Permission slips will go out when students return in January.  They will be taking buses and returning by 11am.

2min). Share it with your students

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up

Reading Cafe - After reading for 30 minutes, students wrote a letter of advice to a character in the book that they are reading.  This letter is one of many reading strategy assignments in the Reading Response Notebook.

Westward Expansion - We completed 2 excellent primary document activities this week.  With the first activity, students (in small groups) had to translate (it is tough to read a 19th century document!) a peace treaty between the Cheyenne and US Government from 1868.  Students then considered the implications of that treaty for the Cheyenne.  We then took a look at a how a Manifest Destiny T-Shirt by GAP created a big controversy last year, ending with GAP pulling the shirt off the shelves.  We looked at tweets, responses, and images from various viewpoints on the use of this term.  Students then wrote their own “tweet” response (paper only), using 140 characters or less.  We then completed our Westward Expansion Graphic Organizer in preparation for a January writing assignment on the topic.

Ms Q’s Corner

CMP8

This week students prepared to take the Looking for Pythagoras with a rousing game of jeopardy.  We completed this unit and we will be moving onto  Frogs, Fleas and Painted Cubes, a unit which introduces quadratic functions.  

CMP7

We completed our Stretching and Shrinking Unit Test and have moved onto our “Shrink it down and Blow it Up” scaling project.  Students have selected cartoons, action figures and logos to create facsimiles of the original.  They will also create a distorted image that follows a rule like 2x, y. Students will then compare the perimeter, area and angles to prove that they are similar. We will be working on these projects when we return from break.

Science 7th/8th

We shifted our thinking from the water cycle to our oceans and the issue of plastic garbage in the five world gyres.  We researched where the plastic is residing, where it is coming from and how it affects sea creatures and the food chain.  Students created informational posters on the issue and what we can do to help our ocean ecosystem.  We began to place our posters around school near trash cans, recycling bins and areas in where we throw things out.  After break we will focus more on ways to prevent and reduce pollution in the ocean.

The Week in Ms. O’s Class

Math 5:  Wow!  We are building our geometry language and all talking like mathematicians!  We spent the week talking about congruence and practicing our translations, rotations, and reflections to prove congruence.  We also reviewed big ideas from the unit:  properties of polygons, angle relationships and measurement, and area of rectangles and triangles.  We will move on to other ideas after break including symmetry, perimeter, and area of other polygons like trapezoids and parallelograms.

Math 6:  Students completed the final ideas of Comparing Bits and Pieces this week by building percent bars and using fraction understanding to find percents of a number and the percent when two other quantities are known (what percent is 14 of 40).  We took our unit assessment this week and those scores will be posted on Jupiter Grades after break. We will take a short detour into an integrated unit on natural resources and statistics (that use fractions, decimals, and percents). Students will be building a collaborative Globopoly game on four natural resource topics:  what we do with our garbage and waste, water resource management, deforestation, and global climate change.  Game pieces will include fraction, decimal, and percent understanding.

Science ⅚:  Students built very strong electromagnets using their understanding of electrical current and have really begun to solidify the ideas in this unit.  We built word maps of our learning, have done several investigations, including one that involved data collection and graphing (we have some work to do in this dept!), and are moving toward a big research project on the telegraph.  Our resident engineer, Dan, has been an amazing link to the real world and what a gift he has been to me in my own understanding of electricity and magnetism.  Students will have a chance to enter the world of motors and generators the next time we meet and to ultimately learn about morse code and the mechanism used to send it!  

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanites: This week students took part in independent reading, and we also took time to catch up on current events and discuss events happening around the world. As the week continued on we played around with our work on sentence diagramming and sentence variety by taking on the role of a movie critic and writing movie reviews! Students had a lot of fun with this, and I think we may have even seen a glimpse into the future with some of our own Voyager students becoming Movie Critics! During our PM Humanities classes students were given time to work on their Vermont Impact projects. These were based around Vermont tourism and attracting tourists to our state through its rich history, variety of products, and famous people. Some of our final products included a Vermont tourism video, an ABC Book, placemats for local restaurants, educational posters, and even a book about the adventures of Senator Leahy. I can’t wait to read through these and put them up in our own “Welcome to Vermont” display, which will be coming to Voyager House in 2014. Wishing everyone a Happy Winter and Happy New Year! See you in 2014!!