Week of March 3

Collections for the 14th Annual Big Basket Raffle and Silent Auction are underway!  This is one of FAP’s biggest fundraisers of the year, with proceeds funding FAP programs that support all WCS and ABS students, families and staff.  Items donated by our Williston School District families will be made into beautiful themed baskets that will be raffled off at the BIG BASKET RAFFLE on Saturday, April 12, 2014.

We ask each family to donate one (or more) item(s) that relate to your class theme:

Ms. Wesnak- Teen Time

Ms. Quatt- Let’s Get Fit

Ms. O’Brien- Best of Boston

Mr. Merrill- Fondue Fun

Ms. Q’s Corner

CMP7 and CMP8

Due to the play unit, we had an abridged math class.  Our 7th grade students reviewed ratios, proportions and began looking at the meaning of slope.  In 8th grade we reviewed function notation and explored parent functions and their translations.

7th/8th Science:

We introduced our engineering task and students began working with their groups.  Next week we will have double science periods to design, build, test and redesign our cars, space landers, marshmallow projectiles and ziplines.  March 18th is the school wide engineering  competition, and Voyager students will be  competing for the “bragging rights” of best design for the task.

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room: Brought to you by Olivia, Halina, Natalie, and Davis!

Words From Our Student Directors: The Voyager play unit has come to an end. As you have probably heard from your tired cast or crew member, this week was a little hectic. There were difficulties with sound, headsets and set changes, but we all came through and performed a great show! We would like to thank all those who participated in the production, whether cast, crew or staff. Aside from the bumps in the road, we all put so much hard work into making this play be “audience-ready” and a great success! Though Tuesday and Wednesday were a little stressful with full dress rehearsals and working with sets for the first time, Thursday’s productions were absolutely fantastic. It was truly an amazing experience to see our creation come to life and we thank you all for supporting Voyager in this process!

Words From Our Stage Managers: This week was performance week, and we all managed to get back from vacation and  get on track right away. Our lines were memorized, the red curtain was fixed and blocking was finalized, we were well on our way to being fully prepared for the show. There wasn’t a single person involved that wasn’t nervous, but that was natural. The nerves were good.

Before each of our performances, we warmed up together in the auditorium. One of the most important warmups was when we gathered together in a circle around the auditorium. We all held hands with the people next to us, and sent out a “heartbeat” pulse around to everyone. The warm up showed that without cooperation from even just one person, things wouldn’t be able to be accomplished. We needed everyone in the room, all of Voyager house, to pull this play off. Every person was essential to this production. Now that we have completed all of our performances, we can see that things have definitely come together.  We’ve come so far together as a house, and it’s going to be hard to say goodbye to it all.

The Week in Ms. O’s

Getting back to some regularity in our schedule, we set math goals this week related to Habits of Mind and Interaction.  Students have chosen one of four areas to focus:  Habits of Interaction, particularly the commitment to share thinking with dyad partner, Make Sense of My Thinking and the Thinking of Others (what is the same, what is different, does the thinking make sense based on what I know), Justifying (how do I show and explain my work so others can understand, how do I use models to explain my thinking) and Generalizing (what patterns do I notice, what conjectures can I make about the structure and regularity of the math, can my conjecture be generalized to all cases).  

Math next week...6th Graders should bring in a snack for a data analysis project on food.  If it can be an extra snack beyond the usual that would be great.  We will be using it to learn more about data and how to use data to make decisions.

Science:  We have a big independent project coming soon and wanted to give you a heads up.  Students will have the choice to:  virtually climb Mt. Everest, make a meal for your family, interview a doctor about disease, dissect a sheep or pig organ, build a prosthetic, or build a helmet in order to fulfill the goals of the project.  Students will be using iMovie as a tool to share their learning with others.  We will also have class time dedicated to this work.  We will choose these projects relatively early in the week as we investigate onion, cheek, and other kinds of cells.  This project is due, April 4th.  All documents will be shared with students and then with you!