Week of March 24

Hi Amazing Voyager Families!

Thanks to all who made Saturday's Recycle Sale a great success!  

We've made $ 1,900.81

Voyager is an amazing community of kids and parents who work together to deliver results!   This will GREATLY reduce the cost of the year-end field trip for EVERY student in the house.

We can't even begin to thank individuals...the wiki was exploding with volunteers.  The kids were awesome...some worked ALL day selling bakes goods, helping shoppers carry things to their car, cleaning up.  Everyone really went the extra mile to make this fundraiser great.  

Thanks to all who brought merchandise in, tagged it Friday night, baked cupcakes, worked shifts, cleaned up and brought the left-overs to the Good Will!

I'm in awe every day as to how strong our Voyager community is.  Great Kids, Great Parents!

Thank you!!!!!

Voyager FAP

Ms. Jess

Summer is coming... “I THINK”!

Ms. Q's Corner

CMP8- This week our 8th grade mathematicians took the standard form of a quadratic equation and transformed it into the vertex form.  Students used the method called "completing the square" in order to create this form of equation.  The vertex form allows you to see the vertex point of a parabola which is an important graphing landmark.  The quadratic equation was also introduced as a means to find the roots of a quadratic function.  With our smaller sub group of 8th graders, we are practicing the distributive property and factoring in order to solve linear equations.  

CMP7- This week our 7th grade mathematicians began balancing algebraic equations using visual and symbolic models.  We discovered the system of pouches and gold coins in the Kingdom of Monterak.  This exercise allowed students to discover the number of coins in a pouch based on equalities.  This investigation was  similar to our use of the I-pad program "Hands-on Equations", where students balance pons and numbers on each side of a balance to find out the actual worth of the pon.

Science 7th/8th- We completed watching the BBC video on Genetic Disorders.  We went on to read about how genetic disorders are passed on from generation to generation and we learned about disorders that are sex-linked traits.  In order to understand the effect of diseases on the human body, we reviewed what we know about the different body systems and how they work together to keep us healthy.

5th and 6th grade Humanities

This week groups of 5th and 6th graders finished researching their chosen cultures.  Each group had to research the geography, demographics, tradition, art and music, folktales, languages, current events, and religion/beliefs.  Each group had to create a poster with pictures for each aspect along with captions.  Groups ended their research with a presentation in the Kiva to their peers.  After their presentations two guest speakers came in with examples of Thai food.  The guest speakers included Thai exchange teacher Apple and my mother, Wilwon Claughton.  The purpose of the guest speakers was for students to understand how people keep their traditions even away from culture. Having two thai guests reinforced the learning that students had over the past two weeks as they have been learning about the aspects that make up traditions through the Thai and US cultures as examples.  

Next week we will be starting an interdisciplinary unit, the topic will be water.  We will be learning the craft of argument writing, writing an argument piece on issues concerning water, debating, and learning about natural resources and phyiscal geography.  We read a picture book titled “Hey, Little Ant”, which lead into our first lesson on argument writing.  Ask your student about the book.

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanities: This week in Humanities students started off with our regular Independent Reading Monday and Current Events in the afternoon. Current Events time always includes watching CNN Student News, having a class discussion, reading a debate topic in Junior Scholastic, and concluding with a whole class debate on the topic. As the week continued on students finished up their work on their Historical Fiction Narrative Projects by finishing up set design, creating props, and practicing their lines. The final outcomes were great! Students performed some wonderful historical fiction plays that followed a plot triangle and had well developed characters. Students really embraced the time period that their narrative took place in by using names, phrases, and clothing that were current at the time. These plays were not only fun to watch but informative! During our PM time together we started digging into the geography of the United States by beginning with the basics. We are starting with the regions, states, and capitals of our country. The two regions we are focusing on now are the Northeast and South. Students will have a quiz on the states and capitals included in these regions on Tuesday, April 1st. Students are encouraged to study with flash cards, the blank maps that were provided to them in class, or by using the geography games that can be found on my website under “Helpful Links”. Hope everyone has a great weekend, and hope to see some of you at the Recycle Sale!

A few notes from Ms. Sherman-

Do you have a child that struggles to get their work completed, stay organized, or needs more assistance to complete homework? This is a reminder that Voyager house has a homework club that meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00-4:25. If transportation is a concern, not a problem. WCS provides an after school activity bus that leaves from the front of the building at 4:30. The homework club is supervised by Elizabeth Percy, one of our fabulous house paraprofessionals, but regularly teachers are also available for extra help and further instruction in all content areas.

Lost and Found- With winter hopefully ending soon, Voyager has noticed an increased amount of personal belongings hanging out in the halls and around the house. Every Friday we will lay out these “lost” items in the KIVA and ask students to take a look for their personal items. At the end of the day, we will bring the belongings to the main lost and found, located at the front lobby.

The Week in Ms. O’s

***Important Note about Science Project:  This Project is due April 7.  I recognize that we are all busy at home and don’t want to put the pressure on, but please ask your child how things are going on their project.  We have been doing this work full time in class, but it always helps to be working at home too.  Thanks for all the help you provide your child.

Math 5:  Student have been working with Greatest Common Factor and Least Common Multiple this week, in terms of comparing fractions and simplifying them.  This is another attempt to address fluency.  Please check with your child about independent work on FASTT math and Kahn Academy.

Math 6:  We have been having fun with food labels and the mean.  We have entered some pretty sophisticated investigations using quartiles and identifying the IQR, the Interquartile range.  This summary statistic helps students to understand variability in data.  The book goes into some pretty detailed explanations and tasks. My plan is to simplify this a bit, as this material came from Samples and Populations, a CMP 2 8th grade book.  I think we are digging at the meat of the concept, so they will get what they need to meet the Common Core standard.  We are heading into a brief decimal computation unit and then on to Algebra.