Important Information and Events
- Report Cards went home this week- please sign and return report card envelope!
- Variety Show - TONIGHT!! - 7pm in WCS Auditorium- Tickets $6 each
- Pie Sale Fundraiser happening now!! Adams Farm Market Pies are being sold for $15 each- large variety, sale ends Thursday, March 27th and pies will be available for pick-up at Adams Market in April
- Voyager Recycle Sale is Saturday, March 29th 9am-3pm- Drop-off items Friday, the 28th, from 6-8pm Volunteers are still needed to help the day of the sale http://voyagerfap.wikispaces.com/home
Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up
This week class is being taught by UVM intern June Claughton for her two weeklong solo unit on cultures. Students have been learning about the importance of culture in the 21st century as well as the various aspects that make up culture. Students will be placed in groups that will be responsible for researching a different country’s culture and create a poster and presentation on the poster. To help students learn the aspects that make up a culture they have been looking at two different ones in class, the first being American and the second is Thai with the help of Apple the Thai exchange teacher at Williston Central School this year. 
Ms. Q’s Corner
CMP7
How can you tell if there is a linear relationship in a table, equation or graph? What does the coefficient and “y” intercept mean in the context of day-to day situations? Students investigated ways to form equations from tables and created tables and graphs from equations. Students ended the week with a “Moving Straight Ahead” check-up.
CMP8
This week we continued to translate and reflect families of functions. We looked for graphing “land marks” from different forms of quadratic equations and investigated the vertex form. Students completed a “Partner Quiz” and we had a little fun with oreo eating!
Science 7th/8th
The big news this week was the Engineering Challenge Day on March 18th. Having started last week, our 7th/8th grade teams designed, built, tested and redesigned solutions to the engineering problems. Students from all over the school competed with rubber band cars, ziplines, moon landers and marshmallow flingers. Voyager students performed well in the competition and brought home many laurels.
The winners included:
1st place in Rubber Band Car:Hanna S., Morgan B.,Lucien T.,Riley F.
1st place in Lander: Lydia K., Doug S., Natalie D., Brayden B.
1st place in Marshmallow Flinger: Eli H., Raf R., Grace G.
2nd place in Zipline: Kris K., Justin S., Halina V.,Geneva C.
3rd place in Zipline: Jaden R., Jessica G., Nathalie P., Graham S.
It was an exciting event and all of our students deserve kudos for a job well done. Lab reports on our engineering tasks were passed in on Friday. Next week we venture back into Biology with our study of genetic disorders.
The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room
Humanities 7/8: This week for Humanities has been a week of wrap-up activities. For our AM time together Monday started with independent reading and some character comparison work using Venn diagrams. Our afternoon has been dedicated to work on the engineering tasks, and on Tuesday we certainly showcased our work well!! On Tuesday while students were not competing in the engineering day, they were on house working on a variety of items. 7th graders rotated through global current event learning stations in the morning by watching CNN Student News, reading Jr. Scholastic articles, and working on a puzzle that was a map of our world. Most of the puzzle pieces were in the shape of countries or regions, so this was a nice kick-off to our geography unit. In the afternoon 7th graders did work with creating plot triangles and making connections to our 20th Century History BIG question: How does the written word change our perspective of history and light the path to our global future? 8th graders were given the day to work on their 8th Grade Challenge projects. All of them were able to get a lot of work done by either working on their writing component, reserving space for their community connections, or even building their presentations. As the week continued on and we celebrated our winnings from the engineering day, we got back into our routine. During our morning time together we completed some journal writes, and worked on our historical fiction narratives. In the afternoon we brought our work on the Cold War to a close by playing Cold War Jeopardy. Students created their own questions for the game board, and the competition was quite heated! Friday wrapped up with a check-in and work time for our narrative project, while the afternoon class was used to launch into our final unit of study: Geography!
WCS Outdoor Learning Classroom
Hello, my name is Lucien Theriault and for my 8th Grade Challenge I will be building an outdoor classroom for the students of Williston Central School.
I am designing a project to incorporate my love of nature and a focus on education. I will work to build an outdoor classroom for the community. As part of this project I have created questions relating to my topic, specifically about connecting education with nature and how learning outside can enhance a child’s mood, and comprehension of the lesson being taught. My community connection is building the outdoor learning environment and making it welcome, accessible and useful for all. The learning space will be within walking distance from the school and have seats around a blackboard.
In order for me to purchase the necessary materials for this project, I will need to raise $250. A donation of any amount will help create this outdoor classroom to be used by students and teachers for years to come!
If you would like to donate to my project please ask Lucien, in Ms.Wesnak’s core for a donation page. Thank you very much.
The Week in Ms O’s
The iPads were out this week! It was like teaching a completely different group of students! They were quiet, engaged and resourceful. Not for every day, not forever, but what a nice change...like the first day of spring!
Math 5: We began our new unit this week after an early week assessment. This unit, Unit 6, is a continuation of Unit 4 work on division and fractions. We used Educreations on the iPads to model problem solving situations and made sense of the relationship between division and fractions.
Math 6: We are deep in data! Numbers everywhere. We analyzed some of our snack foods this week for sugar content in grams. Some interesting summary statistics came out of this including just the immense amount of sugar that is in our food! We also tackled the big question of measures of middle: mode, median, and mean. What are they, how do you calculate them and when do you use them? We recognized that range is a big deal when it comes to deciding what measure of middle to use in a given situation. We talked about clusters, gaps, range of variability, and outliers. We had a quick quiz today on our work thus far.
Science ⅚
On Tuesday, students had a chance to talk with the Chief of Pediatric Pathology at Boston Children’s Hospital via Skype. It was amazing...we were able to see actual slides on his microscope in his office, normal and otherwise. He talked about cells, blood diseases and other amazing things. What a privilege to have a connection to the outside world.
We began a deep investigation of cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems this week with brief overviews of levels of complexity (cell to tissue to organ to organ systems to organisms), and the launch of an independent project on the human body. Please ask to see your child’s packet and ask about the calendar of due dates, which is important for you to see. I will get that all up on Jupiter grades Monday (some of it needs to be scanned). Students have a choice of projects:
- A virtual climb of Mt. Everest
- A dissection of a cow or pig organ
- A cooking show
- Engineering of a prosthetic
- Engineering of a anti-concussion helmet
- An interview of a specialist in the disease field
Students select a project, then by default a body system or two. Once researched students will do a hands-on project while video taping the process. Then they will use iMovie to make a 5 minute video of their process.
This project honors individuality, independence, each person to work at their own pace. It is also multi-modal (reading, research, hands-on, technology), a format I hope interests students. Please please ask them about daily and weekly due dates. I have included a calendar and will post those due dates on Jupiter Grades.
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