TA’s Notes:
- No dance tonight- rescheduled for next Friday, Oct 10th
- Voyager 8th Graders have received their field trip forms for Washington DC. Please be on the look out for this paperwork, which is due on October 31,2014. Ms. O’Brien will be attending the trip as the Voyager representative.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
The week started off with our Reading Cafe and students writing their first “Reading is Thinking” response to a prompt in their notebooks. We have now completed an activity in each section of the Reading Response Notebook. Students should be prepared to complete some assignments independently and for homework. We also wrapped up our Rule LEAF writing project by using a “Letter Generator” to turn the argument pieces into business letters to be shared with Ms. Parks. Ms. Parks was our guest speaker on Friday morning, and she spoke to the students about their ideas for rule changes and the process the school follows to change rules and policies.
Our candidate forum is just around the corner, and the students have been working very hard on their posters for the candidates. Students had to earn their poster board and markers by presenting a complete note sheet and accurate pencil draft. The energy and enthusiasm for the poster project has been fantastic. I am looking forward to seeing the posters around the building for the candidate forum. The posters are due on Wednesday. We also spent some time working on our Election 2014 vocabulary by starting our first word maps in our Humanities notebooks. The maps will be used for peer teaching and vocabulary practice throughout the rest of the unit.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: What a week! We spent our week working on the ideas related to multiplication! We had several scenarios all related to Brad’s Baseball Shop that allowed us to use our strategies to solve problems with the snap of a finger! We focused on partial product method, a great way for students to see that complicated problems like 78 x 30 can be more easily understood as (70 x 30) + (8x30). We used this understanding to justify solutions to many kinds of problems. Justification comes in the form of visual models! Students are doing a great job! We also reviewed some missed items on the assessment from last week and decided that we wanted another shot at some similar problems. Students, rearmed with new ideas and understanding, completed a retake of that quiz.
Math 6: We have been busy! The CMP 3 Program is really pushing us into some new understandings and we are more readily created generalizations that work every time. I have been so impressed with students, their energy and their grasp of new concepts. I had a student, nearly falling out of his chair this week, to craft a generalization about greatest common factors, least common multiples, and the connection to prime and composite numbers. If I could have measured the energy level in the room, the thermometer would have blown out of the roof! Hilarious and super to make math fun! I am pleased with the effort students are putting into their blog projects and special number project. All blogs are due on Fridays and the rough draft of the Special Number Children’s book, is due on Wednesday of next week. They will have a day to work on their project early this coming week.
Science ⅚: We spent the week learning about engineering. We ended our week with a really amazing inquiry and engineering task. I’ve attached pictures to this blog to speak to the focus and learning that happen this week!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in Humanities we started off with our usual independent reading on Monday, which this week was followed by some great book conversations. In the afternoon we brought our mini study on the 3 Branches of Government to a close with a very fun and entertaining political round robin/interview! Students rotated through their peers and had short conversations learning about each of the 3 Branches of Government on both the state and national level. As the week went on our morning studies turned to the two Vermont Candidates running for a spot in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the afternoon our studies have been focused on the Bill of Rights.
Students have been spending their mornings on computers learning all about Peter Welch and Mark Donka. These two men are the Vermont candidates running for a spot in congress. We reviewed note-taking techniques, and students were given a graphic organizer to complete on each of the candidates. Students were asked to do a close read of the websites for these candidates, so that they could gain knowledge on the big issues and also learn new vocabulary terms. We’ve also taken the time to read some news articles and press releases about the candidates, along with watch and listen to some of their views in a couple debates! We are ending our week by putting all of this gained knowledge into our questions for the Candidate Forum, which is happening on Friday, October 10th! We are all very excited about this because the 7th and 8th grade students have a chance for their questions to be answered by the actual candidates at the forum! So exciting!
During the afternoons, students completed a close read of the Bill of Rights and with their table groups completed a graphic organizer to summarize what each amendment is all about. After our close read, students were asked to vote on one amendment to have a formal debate around. Students used Thursday and part of Friday to prep with their debate teams, and Friday afternoon we opened the debate floor! In Gold’s class, students engaged in debate around the 2nd Amendment: The Right to Bear Arms. In Blue’s class students had a debate around the 4th Amendment: Search and Seizure and whether or not cell phones/smart phones, backpacks, and lockers should be included in that amendment. Both classes voted on amendments that have been hot topics in the news in the past few years, or have even been argued in Supreme Court cases! It was a really fun afternoon!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week we explored inverse variations in the form of graphs, tables and equations. Inverse variation is a nonlinear model that has one variable increasing and one variable decreasing at a decreasing rate. We compared and contrasted these mathematical models with linear models. We also explored different forms of the inverse variation equation: x • y = k, k/x = x, k/x = y. At the end of the week we had a rousing round of Jeopardy and finished off the week with the Thinking with Mathematical Models Unit Test.
CMP7
Wow! We had an intense debate this week about the relationships about the side lengths of triangles. After a lot of “respectful” debate and many experimental models, students began to understand that the sum of the two side lengths of a triangle needs to be greater and not equal to the longest side. We explored the triangle inequality theorem which states that any side of a triangle is always shorter than the sum of the other two sides. Finally, we explored the side lengths of quadrilaterals to see if they have similar properties to triangles. Using the program Geogebra, we were able to manipulate side lengths and angles of quadrilaterals.
Science 7th/8th
This week brought the culmination of our Next Generation Science Standards project on the flow of energy through the ecosystem. We played predator and prey games, card games that showed the flow of energy decreasing as it moves up energy levels and experienced photosynthesis as an obstacle course. Students created models that showed how energy and matter flow. We had a wonderfully active class and students created “how to” papers that explained how the games/models and simulations showed their system and whether it was accurate or not. We will be wrapping up this unit next week.
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