Week of March 31

Voyager FAP Parent Representatives

Voyager house has been extremely fortunate over the past four years to have had Ann Schmidt as our FAP representative. During that time, Ann helped Voyager house establish some of our best traditions and fund raising events.  She has also been a strong advocate for Voyager at the school level and has supported teachers and students in numerous ways. While we are not quite ready to say good-bye to Ann, it is time to start recruiting a new group of parents to support Voyager house and represent us at the FAP level.  

Next year, Voyager would like to have one parent representative for each grade level.  By sharing the responsibilities of FAP representative by grade level, we will be ensuring that Voyager will continue to have strong representation for our Voyager community, our traditions will continue to grow and evolve, and we will maintain an experienced group of parents who can share the responsibilities of the position.  Please consider joining our FAP team.  Feel free to contact any of the Voyager teachers or current FAP representatives for more information.

Ms’ Q’s Corner

CMP8

We have been very industrious in class this week gearing up for our unit tests.  Group 1 worked on completing the square with more and more complex quadratic equations.  We looked closely at the relationship between a parent function and their related translations.  We worked to become adept at interpreting and finding the roots of a quadratic functions through multiple ways; vertex form and  the quadratic formula .  Group 2 continued their work with factoring, solving multi-step equations and using the distributive property.  Next week we gather together as one group to begin systems of equations.

CMP7

When is one payment plan better than another?  What ways can we find the intersection or “break even” point of two linear relationships?  Students investigated using tables, graphing, and equations in order to find that point.  We also dabbled into inequalities.  When  does it “pay” to go with one payment plan when “X” is greater than or less than a specific amount?  Students took a brief “Check-up" this week and we began to investigate slope as a ratio between rise and run.

Science 7th/8th

We completed our hemophiliac investigation with a claim and evidence statement based on our experimental coin toss showing the outcome of a healthy father and hemophilia carrier mother and a father with hemophilia and a carrier mother.  Students compared their Punnett squares or theoretical data with our experimental data.  We read and highlighted several chapters on Infectious disease, took notes from a brief lecture on pathogens, and did a quick research project. With their research, students created “Wanted Dead” signs for a pathogen of their choice.  Student’s were given a broad pathogen category (parasite, bacteria, virus and fungus) and they selected a “germ” that produced a disease that they found interesting.  We investigated pathogens like H1N1 virus, clostridium botulium bacteria and exotic parasites.  Next week we begin our disease research project.

Mr. Merrill ⅚ Humanities Wrap up

What would you choose - a glass of tap water or bottled water?  That is the question that students had to take a position on to start our interdisciplinary unit on Water. Students debated the question and wrote a short position piece.  In preparation for more argument writing, we used a position paper on climate change to find and understand the “claim” of the paper and the evidence and reasons used to support the claim. We will look more deeply into the specific strategies that can be used for this genre of writing next week.  

We also watch “Tapped”, a documentary that focuses on the health and environmental costs of bottled water. Students will use this information, along with reading and research to be completed next week, in a final debate.

Finally, we will be writing persuasive letters to area businesses, to help us with a tree planting project we are hoping to do at Camp Abnaki in the spring.

The Week in Ms. O’s

5th Grade Math: We spent another week looking at Greatest Common Factor and Least Common Multiple as a way to understand fractions.  This foundational work will help move us forward with operations with fractions.  

Fluency is really important.  I will be checking on this regularly this last trimester.  Students should be using FASTT math, or you can always download an app for the iPhone!!  Hooda math is just a simple flashcard system that you can download from the App store.  It is free.  This is a good way to focus on some facts while skipping the ones you know.  Try it out!

6th Grade Math:  6th Graders have been tackling the five summary statistics  idea for determining meaningfulness of data.  We have matched a new representation, the box and whisker plot, or box plot as a way to identify just how variable a data set is.  Simultaneously, we have been suring up foundations in decimal operations.  Multiplication and division are a little more complicated than addition and subtraction, but the foundational principles of place value still apply.  I am pushing students toward the standard algorithm.  Don’t be afraid now, to share that one.  It is the one you know the best!  I will help with the conceptual work at school, but fluency in decimals will be important for moving forward in proportional reasoning.

⅚ Science:  It was a busy week of constructing, climbing, cooking, dissecting and interviewing.  Students captured their learning in video footage and spent Thursday and Friday editing movies to show expertise on body systems.  I was at the National Science Teachers Association conference in Boston, so have yet to see the excitement.  We will spend the first few days of this week reviewing our work and making any final edits.  

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanities: This week in Humanities our 7th and 8th graders began their work on argumentative writing and also began testing and applying their knowledge of U.S. geography. During our A.M. time together this week classes practiced finding evidence and analyzing its meaning by trying to solve a variety of crimes. Our class used stories/puzzles from the book “Crime and Puzzlement” to get used to digging up evidence and answering the “why” questions. “Why” questions include: Why is this important? How does this connect to what we are trying to answer or solve? Through this activity students had to weed out the important evidence and the important clues from the irrelevant ones. These activities were quite entertaining and the classes had a lot of fun taking on the role of a sleuth! As the week continued on students were introduced to the topic for their argumentative writing piece which is: GPS vs. Paper Maps - Which is better for getting you where you need to go? Once our writing is complete we will conclude with a final debate. Students are reading a variety of articles giving them examples of hard evidence towards either side of the argument. Students will have to use the skills we practiced during our days of solving crime and apply them to this argumentative writing task. We took some time in class to do a close reading of one of the articles. We read pieces of the article aloud, discussed proper highlighting techniques, responded to the text with pen or pencil, and analyzed why we wrote what we did or highlighted what we did. The classes are pretty evenly split between GPS and paper map supporters, so once our writing is complete, our final debate should be quite interesting! Speaking of travelling, our P.M. time together has been spent travelling all over the U.S.! This week we moved out of the Northeastern and Southern regions and into the Midwestern and Western regions. Students will be quizzed on the Western and Midwestern regions on Monday afternoon, so keep the studying going! As a close to our week students started work on a SUPER Venn diagram. Students had to pick 4 states, 1 from each major region, that they would like to live in. Using the Venn diagram students had to compare and contrast these 4 states. To compare and contrast these states they are using the “2014 U.S. Almanac and Atlas” from Junior Scholastic. Once the diagram is complete they will try to determine some possible reasons behind the similarities and differences they found. This in-class project became very fun, as students started to talk about (and dream about) what life would be like living in another state.

Ms. Jess

Summer is coming... “I THINK”!