Week of April 14

Happy Break!  Yeah Break!  Got Pencils?  Could you get some for your kiddo over break?  We are fresh out and it is like Survivor here! Ms. O

**Reminder for Pie pick-up at Adam’s Market today until 5pm!!  Thank you for supporting Voyager House!**

CMP8

We continued our investigation of solving systems of linear equations with a candy mystery.  Each student was given a bag of 60 candies made up of an unspecified number of m&m’s and jelly beans. They were able to discern the mass of the total candies and found the average mass of a m & m and a jelly bean.  Students created two equations m + j = 60 and .9m + 1.3j = mass of the bag.  By having both equations they were able to find the solution set or # of m & m’s and jelly beans symbolically and by graphing.  After our math work we looked in the bag to see how close we came to the actual number.  It was sweet surprise!

CMP7

We began the week with review and a jeopardy game on linear equations. Students completed the “Moving Straight Ahead” Unit Test and we are now entering into “Filling and Wrapping” a unit where we investigate area and volume of three dimensional objects.  This week we explored what dimensions you need in order to find surface area or volume and we discovered how Pi was originated.

Science 7th/8th- This week was a bit abridged due to our amazing Songkran Festival and  the extensive fire drill.  We completed the CSSU common assessment and began our discussion about climate change.

The Week in Ms. O’s

Math 5

Fifth graders have been working on an understanding of decimals, deepening understanding of place value and why fractions and decimals are just different ways to say the same number. We are working on order decimals and finding decimals between decimals.  It has been really productive work and I feel like students are really building a deep understanding of our Base Ten system.

Math 6

We began Variables and Patterns this week.  Our work has centered around the idea of patterns in tables and patterns in graphs. Students have come up with some great conjectures for tables and graphs, specifically that points on a graph always match the data points in the table; the story is the same for a graph, even if the interval scale changes; steeper the line in a graph, the greater the change.  Really sophisticated observations for three days in.  We had our last studio of the year and it was fantastic.  WCS teachers were so impressed with the habits of these 6th graders – they persevere, they model, they talk to each other, they are critical thinkers.  Good for them.

Science 5/6

We successfully engineering a natural materials filter to simulate the basic filtering system on Earth’s surface.  Students independently tested natural materials, like sand, moss, leaves, sand, etc. to identify their filtering quality.  From there, students collaboratively built bottle filters, a three inch layer of natural materials to see just how effective these materials can be when stacked together.  This allowed us to generalize the value of our Earth’s surface for groundwater health.  From there, we are moving into landfills and the MRF.  The Materials Recovery Facility or MRF is here in Williston.  I am hoping to have someone come to class to talk about this awesome place after break.  As we continue work learning about the basics of waste disposal, we will focus our energy on the packaging related to bottled water.

Homework Over the Break:  You may have some refrigerator pickers over the break.  All students in 5/6 have an assignment to categorize the material packaging in the refrigerator over break. I heard a million excuses – I’m not at home, I have no fridge, I’m in Florida the whole time…I’d love it if you could make this happen, even if it’s Grandma’s fridge.  It is important data for our class work on bottled water.

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up

Wow, what a wet and fun week!  After wrapping up our spring on demand writing assessments on Monday morning (the students put in a great effort!), we celebrated the Thai Songkran Festival (New Year Water Celebration) lead by Apple, our Thai scholar. Apple gave a presentation, then students partipated in two of the traditions - showing respect and giving thanks (or asking for forgiveness) by kneeling before a teacher and sprinkling flower water over the hands, and having fun outdoors by spraying friends with water (a sign of renewal, cleansing, and new beginnings).

We then dove deeper into our study of water issues.  Students completed their research using our wiki of fantastic sources, taking notes using the Cornell method. We also watched a CBS news story on bottle water bans on college campuses.  Students were excited to act and we started to brainstorm things that we might do here at WCS to limit or ban bottle water.. We had a great brainstorm - look for some action on this in May.  

We then had former Voyager student Kellie Weening present her CVU senior challenge work on global water issues to our students.  She plans to work with the students in the fall on a rain barrel project.

Finally, we had a UVM debate team member - Alex Bulick, lead our students through the format that they use in competition.  Alex discussed strategy and debating techniques with the students, then we had our own debate using the format and techniques discussed. Questions debated were the same argument questions students are writing about - Is bottle water really better? and Should bottled water be banned at WCS?

The Week in Ms. Wesnak's Room

7/8 Humanities: This has been a very full and very fun week in Humanities! For our final week before vacation our morning time together was really focused on finishing up our work on the argumentative essay: GPS vs. Paper Map. Students had their rough drafts due for peer editing on Tuesday and their final drafts were due on Friday. Our morning classes on Wednesday and Thursday were focused on creating storyboards for our first project with the Blockhouse Bay Intermediate School in New Zealand. Our first assignment is to create ¨Day in the Life" videos to exchange via our school YouTube channels. Students will be creating videos that showcase what the average day is like for a Voyager student. These video projects already have been very fun to work on, and we are all very excited to see the videos made from students at Blockhouse Bay Intermediate! In our afternoon classes we focused on our Road Trip U.S.A. project. As the week went on students really started to get into this project by mapping out their routes, deciding on exciting and fun places to stop along the way, and beginning to build their interactive maps through Google Maps Engine. We were lucky enough to have Ms.Birdsall join our class this week to introduce us to Google Maps Engine and get all of our students started on creating their interactive road trip map. If you haven't seen or used Google Maps Engine before, I highly suggest it! It is not only fun and pretty easy to use, but you can really go into great detail when planning any trip. Using this site has certainly sparked the travel bug in our 7/8 students. Over break students are encouraged to do some work on their maps and/or continue working on writing their short profiles of the 6 stops they are going to make along their road trip across the country! It has been a packed week, but certainly a fun one! Hope everyone has a wonderful April vacation!

**8th Grade Challenge Update from Ms.W**

Attention all parents of 8th Graders: All students have a scheduled time to present their 8th Grade Challenge Projects. They are either presenting on the Monday or Tuesday after break. Each student has a scheduled time to present, and you are of course invited to join our Kiva to view their presentation! If you are interested in knowing your child's presentation time please email me, and I would be happy to provide you with that information. The writing component and presentation is due at their scheduled time. We are all very excited to see the final outcome of their hard work!

Week of April 7

Reminder for Adam’s Market Pie pick-up!!!  Pick-up your pre-ordered pie at Adam’s Farm Market on April 17th or 18th between 10am-5pm!

Water Festival - Monday, April 14

Apple Prommasakul, our Thai Scholar, will be leading us in the Water Festival on Monday, a great Thai tradition.  Students should wear a colorful shirt for the event and be prepared to get a little wet.

Williston Central School Fundraisers:

• Sterling Night at Ramunto’s  Tuesday, April 15th

Ramuntos will donate a percentage of orders all day.  Eat in or Take Out. No Coupon required.

• Swift’s Mother’s Day Flower Sale Order your 10” hanging flower baskets for pick-up at Adams Farm Market between 5/7 and 5/11.  You may select from the hundreds of baskets available in solid or a combination of colors.  Order forms available in the School Bell or in WCS & ABS front office  $24.00 each.

WCS Dialogue Night- rescheduled for Wednesday, April 16th 6-7:45pm WCS Dining Room.  For the pizza part of the evening, 6-6:15PM, please RSVP to Sarah,

SAP Counselor, sklionsky@cssu.org or 871-6079, by Monday 4/14- co-sponsored by FAP

We will provide students with a homework pass for the night!  Encourage your child to go!

Ms. Q’s Corner

CMP8

This week we took a pause from our new investigation “It’s in the System” to reintroduce exponent rules, solving algebraic equations with fractions and simplifying equations with polynomials.  This review will help in transforming  linear equations from slope intercept form to standard form.  Knowing how to transform an equation will allow students to begin finding solutions to systems of linear equations.  This week the  Algebra Final  was set for  Friday, June 6th.

CMP7

We are coming to the completion of “Moving Straight Ahead” with emphasis on creating equations from points, graphs and tables.  We also investigated how a linear function can be translated by changing the coefficient or slope of the line and by changing the y-intercept.  We observed how you can tell from an equation if the line is parallel or perpendicular.  Next week students will be taking the unit assessment.

  

Science 7th/8th

We began the week with the kickoff of our PSA  project. Working alone or with a partner, students researched a genetic or infectious disease, created a short well written script and filmed their 30 second- 120 second spot.

Students utilized a variety of media apps to get their word across.

Notes from Ms. Sherman-

Celebrating Voyager 8th Graders

This Friday, Ms. Sherman and Ms. Wesnak, your fearless teachers, are hosting an 8th grade celebration night. The night will be a great way for our 8th grade family to come together to reflect on their time as Voyager students, indulge in some great eats, and have some merriment after hours. We both look forward to seeing you there and celebrating! We would like to say thank you to all the 8th grade families for providing transportation to and from the school.

The Week in Ms. O’s

Math 5:  Students have been perfectly the art of addition and subtraction of fractions.  Students are working hard on two basic principles:  Least Common Multiple and Greatest Common Factor.  When do I use the LCM?  The GCF?  I have been psyched and amazed at the versatility students are showing with fraction operations and excited to move forward with multiplication and division.  Late in the week we began looking at decimals.  We have made the leap seamlessly!  Students understand that decimals are fractions with denominators of 10, 100, 1000, and are revisiting ideas of magnitude in our base ten number system.  

Math 6:  We wrapped up our Data about Us book this week!  The concepts covered in this book have been a little challenging in that students had to decide on the story of the data based on measures of center (mode, median and mean) and measures of variability (range and interquartile range).  Although most students come to sixth grade knowing how to find mode and median, students are now asked to decide which measure of middle to use.  What if the data is skewed, symmetrical, clustered, which measure of middle is best?  Are there any outliers and how do they affect the mean?  I think many students have made long term changes in their understanding of data.  Tough unit!  On to Variables and Patterns, our first significant dip into algebra concepts before the big 7th grade year in linear and nonlinear equations.

Science ⅚:

Students wrapped up their iMovies this week and should have posted to the WCS you tube site.  Feel free to take a look at them.  I found myself laughing hysterically (and learning too) while watching some the other night.  I was amazed at the ease with which they made the movies, now I am hoping that they are rich in science.  I will assess these over break.  I will also be sure to let you know if your child has not uploaded to youtube.  Could mean they aren’t done.  

We are doing a mini integrated unit in science and humanities on tapped and bottled water.  We began our first science investigation on Friday looking at natural filter systems.  Students will be engineering the best filter system they can on Monday and Tuesday.  This is based on the science they investigate on natural materials and their filtering quality.  We will move on to other investigations around plastics and water on Earth.

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up

Should the show go on? Whether or not to keep killer whales in marine parks was the focus of our debate this week. Common core standards include speaking and listening skills, and debate.  The debate format we used reflected the argument writing format that we are using in class, giving students another way to practice their argument organizing skills. Students also completed persuasive letters, with the hope that area tree nurseries will support our community service project of planting trees at Camp Abnaki in June.  

In preparation for our final argument writing piece, students learned to take Cornell notes. They will be using a library wiki to find articles, video, and podcasts to complete their research next week.  Students also shared in creating a huge Google presentation titled, “Bodies of Water Around the World”.  A very impressive digital slide show!

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanities - This week in Humanities students continued their work around geography by working on their argumentative writing piece and studying U.S. geography. During our morning time together students were given a thorough outline of the argumentative essay, a checklist for argumentative writing, and class time to work on their writing. This was all in prep for their peer edit day on Tuesday. Their final draft will be due on the Friday before vacation, and when we return from vacation the battle between the GPS and a Paper Map will be brought to the debate floor! During our afternoon time students took a quiz on the Western and Midwestern regions of the United States on Monday. As the week went on we learned about the 5 Themes of Geography and specifically zoned in on the theme of “Place”, which includes physical and human characteristics. Students came up with a list of global physical characteristics, and we also labeled some physical characteristics of the U.S. on a map. Students also took a look at various maps of the United States. We compared and contrasted maps of climate, vegetation, land use, and energy/mineral resources. We also looked at the relationship between climate and vegetation, and climate and land use. This is all in preparation for our Road Trip U.S.A. project which will launch next week!

***We also had a special guest visitor in our classroom this week! Jade Dobson, a 6th Grade Teacher from Auckland, New Zealand came to visit Vermont and our classroom this week. She shared out information on New Zealand and the Maori culture. Students learned a lot and also laughed a lot during her time in our classroom. Why was Jade here you might ask? Well, I’m very happy to announce that our Humanities class will be taking part in a global project with Jade’s school in New Zealand! Jade will be our contact teacher in New Zealand, and we will be working with her and her students on a variety of projects. One of our first projects will be around current events and global geography. Students will be offered chances to Skype with Jade’s students, we will be sharing videos through our school youtube channels, sharing google documents to complete projects together, and also sharing our writing and thoughts through Kidblog. A permission slip and further information about the project and how we were given this great opportunity will be going home next week!! Kia Ora!

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”!