TA’s Notes:
Snack time is a “working snack” meaning students have a small snack in the morning during class time. They are given time to retrieve their snacks and are expected to eat and work during class time. Any food that needs to be microwaved must be held back until lunch time.
Message from CVU Student:
Winter Coat Drive
This year CVU's sophomore class partnered with Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program in helping those in need of winter coats stay warm this winter. We are hoping that the community of Williston will aid us in our mission by bringing in your gently used winter wear and leaving it in the box in the WCS lobby. Our drive will be ending the day before Thanksgiving break, with possible extension. Thank you for all your help in support!
-Eva Rocheleau Sophomore Co-President
After school with Ms. Sherman:
Homework Club - Mr. Merrill is available (most days) at Homework Club (until 4pm) for individual or small group support. Please let him know ahead of time if you would like to schedule individual support for your student.
If your student is staying for Homework Club, please pack an extra snack for your child, some of the students are mentioning that they are hungry at the end of the day. Thank you.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
The focus for our Reading Cafe this week was to think about how the book you are reading makes you feel or to identify the feelings of the characters in your book. Students wrote a response to this in their Reading Response Notebooks. For current events, the kids completed a scavenger hunt, learning how to navigate online news sources and newspapers to find articles on specific topics. They had a lot of fun working with their “clock partners” on this activity.
Following our visit to the book fair, students continued working on taking Cornell Notes. This time, they were responsible for taking their notes independently using the Cornell format. At the end of the unit, students will have taken Cornell Notes on all three branches of government.
Finally, in conjunction with our study of the branches of government, students prepared for a mock trial using the Pro Se Court format. Each student is preparing for their role (judge, attorney for the city of Chicago, or attorney for Jesus Morales), and will participate in the court hearing next week. The case is based on a real Supreme Court ruling.
Finally, a big THANK YOU for all of the book donations. These books will become a part of our own house library, students can sign them out throughout the school year. We will do a book review of all the new additions after the Thanksgiving break. We have had over 75 books signed out since the beginning of the school year.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5:Our goal this week is to build the idea of equivalent fractions into our understanding of operations with fractions. We spent a few days viewing number lines and trying to relate, say a number line divided into fifths with one divided into tenths. We even looked at sixths and eighths to begin to understand how this could be true. Generalizations came about...the first is: whenever lines match up on a number line in which the wholes are the same, then you have a pair of equivalent fractions. The other generalization was related to multiplying by 1 or another name for one, like 2/2. So a fraction like 4/6 and ⅔ can be proven equivalent which the lines on their respective number lines match up. We can also prove equivalence by saying that ⅔ x 2/2 equals 4/6. Any number multiplied by 1 is itself. Continental math folks have been working really hard and took their first challenge this week. Thanks to Sandy Connolly for all she is doing to help students work through these interesting problems.
Math 6: Our goal this week is to move from fractions and ratios to decimals and to see these representations as offering a deeper understanding of numbers that represent parts of wholes. We had several interesting problems to work through and students worked hard on them. The first was to go back to some basic skills like renaming improper and mixed numbers and then comparing them to each other. We also look at groups of fractions to decide using generalizations which are greater. The generalizations were: comparing to ½ to see if the number is bigger or smaller than ½; viewing fractions whose denominators were different but numerators were the same; viewing and comparing fractions whose denominators are the same, but whose numerators are different; and viewing fractions which are one unit away from the whole. Students were really challenging by this last one, but used what they know about unit fractions to work their way to the generalization. We are moving to decimal representations next week and a last quiz on Investigations 1-3 in Comparing Bits.
Science ⅚:
- creating and launching rockets the week before the holiday break. Check it out and come see!
- photo or sketch journal of the moon’s phases.
- trout eggs are arriving in January!
Students are completing a word map to reinforce relationships amongst words in science. The focus of the map is on Natural Selection. Students have done a really nice job trying to figure out how traits and genes are related to each other and how Darwin and Natural Selection or Origin of Species are related. Students worked in partner groups. I will be giving a pie chart to students on Monday to ask them to reflect on the partnership and how balanced it was in terms of the work completed. Please remind your child that they are responsible for their part, not the part their partner has chosen to do or not do! Final assessment was today. Students really persevered through a lot of vocab identification and essay type questions. Good for them!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in Humanities has been loaded with debates, essay construction, and bringing our citizenship project to a close!
During our morning time together students started the week with our usual Independent Reading Mondays. Students were asked to analyze the title of their book and find evidence to support why the book was given its title, or find evidence to support a new title of their own making. As the week moved on spent two of our classes debating birthright citizenship. Both classes were able to hold strong and respectful debates. Students were really able to draw evidence from sources and use them to support their opinions. All students participated and at the end, despite their differences in opinion, shook hands and congratulated each other on a job well done! The rest of the week was spent working on our 5-paragraph argument essay. Students will be writing about youth immigration in the U.S. and have been provided a whole packet filled with information such as the essay outline, a writing checklist, and the rubric.
Our afternoons started off with current events on Monday, and we also started to prep for the Geography Bee. We are using the Daily Quiz on National Geographic’s “Study Corner” site to start our preparation. The rest of the week was dedicated to bringing our citizenship project to a close. Students worked really hard on this project, and had a great time seeing how adults did on their tests! I’m excited to see the graphs and final data to see what kind of conclusions we can come to. A HUGE THANK YOU to all parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, siblings, friends, and staff who took our tests! Without you, students would not have found the success they did in this project!!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
We completed our “Growing, Growing, Growing” Unit with a review of scientific notation, exponent rules and practice problems using both growth/decay rates and factors. Students have learned to create equations, tables and graphs that reflect these mathematical systems. Unit tests and will be returned sometime next week. On Friday, we began our new investigation called “Looking for Pythagoras”. We began to look at the origin of squares and square roots by creating different size squares both horizontally/vertically oriented and tilted.
CMP7
The 7th graders completed their Accentuate the Negative Unit with practicing Order of Operation and the Distributive Property. We played an exciting game of jeopardy and completed a class record of our new “rules” when utilizing positive and negative integers. We began our new unit called “Stretching and Shrinking” which looks at similar figures. We used some rubber band stretchers to see if we could create a larger similar image from smaller ones.
Science 7th/8th
This week our focus was on Newton’s Third Law; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. We built and tested straw rockets to see firsthand how air going in one direction could launch a rocket in the opposite direction. Students reviewed their motion and forces vocabulary for a brief “pop quiz” and then worked to find the definition of gravity and its relation to mass. Members of the class presented cartoons, raps, songs, demonstrations, posters and poems to explain this elemental force.
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