TA’s Notes:
- Friday, February 6th, Voyager is sponsoring the Valentines Dance!
We need a number of chaperones and we need everyone to donate to the concessions so our fundraiser is as successful as possible! The concession funds we raise go to field trips and extracurricular educational activities, so please plan to help out with your time and a snack donation.
Math Help with Ms. Q and Writers Workshop with Ms. Wesnak are now on Thursdays from 3:00-4:25!
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week, we wrapped up the Reading is an Investment reading logs, reading two money related picture books that generated some great discussion about how to use money. We also read an article titled “Money and You” that focused on lessons young adults have learned about making smart financial choices. Students then created a money plan, considering all four ways of using money - save, invest, donate, and spend. They will also be making a poster to submit for the Financial Literacy Poster state competition.
Next week we will begin playing the Stock Market Game. The game requires students to work in teams and find consensus before making investment decisions. We practiced some consensus making techniques, as well as learned what a “company” is. We will continue lessons about stocks, risk, diversification and investment strategy throughout the course of the game. Each team will have $100,000 to invest in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds and will invest “real time”.
Our survival scripts are coming along, students did some self and peer content revision and started to type their scripts into a 3 column script format - detailing video and audio scenes.
We will be rehearsing next week and starting to use the ipads to make our videos (hopefully by the end of the week).
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: This week we practiced rounding decimals, placing them on number lines, and introduced division of whole numbers. The new instruction this week was on division; how we know that a problem involves division and how we use base ten pieces to model that situation. We practiced writing story problems and solving others’ story problems.
Math 6: We practiced and practiced fraction operations and did many straight up computation problems involving fractions. We also sleuthed problems where students needed to figure out which operation would help find the solution, rather than having me tell them, ‘these are division of fraction’ problems. This is a really tough skill. Students have received a list of words that indicate certain operations and they will be allowed to use this on assessments. We do have a unit assessment coming...next Tuesday. I will spend Friday and Monday building public records with students and practicing.
Heads up: We have modified the 6th grade curriculum for the rest of the year. Decimal Operations and Covering and Surrounding will be taught in a slimmed down version in order to get to algebra and data and statistics two very important concepts for 7th grade and middle school. This means that conceptual frameworks will be simplified and that we will be doing a lot of computation practice.
Science ⅚: This week we learned about the moon’s light and shadows. In order to understand why the moon appears to change shape, we must learn about where the moon’s light comes from and the kinds of shadows that might exist in our Solar System. We had the chance to confirm that the moon’s light is reflected light from the Sun. What we see, when the moon is out and we can see it, is the Sun’s light reflecting off the surface of the Earth and the bouncing into our eyes. When we cannot see parts of the moon, the part we cannot see is in self-shadow. Cast shadows are next week! We then spent 2 days modeling the moon’s phases in order to understand just what is happening out there and how what we see depends on the moon’s position in its orbit around the sun and whether we are inside or outside of its orbit. Did you know? That moon people see the Earth in the opposite phase that we see the Moon. That if you are outside the Moon’s orbit of Earth that you would see the moon’s phases as folks on Earth would see as the moon is orbiting.
Trout Fridays...today we will begin our research on a choice project. If you would like to be invited to the Trout Google Site, please email Ms. O with your email address, so that you can watch things unfold in our tank!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week during our morning time together, we got back into Independent Reading Mondays. Students read for about 30 minutes and responded to their reading in their Reading Journals. As the week continued on we wrapped up our work with the read aloud Rules by completing a final reflection. Students were asked to respond to 1 out of 4 questions that had to do with making connections through imagery. By the middle of the week we were able to get into our next big writing unit which is around personal stories. Our big question for this trimester is: What is my story? As we move through the next couple of months we will be doing work around and with biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Students will be writing a biography on a person of their choice from 20th century history, and they will also be writing memoir (or personal narrative). To prepare for these pieces, we will be completing a grammar study on conjunctions and semi-colons, and we will also be practicing writing with detail, description, and the five senses. We ended our week with a fun journal write to get students thinking about people and the stories they carry or may share. Students were asked to write about 5 people, alive or dead, that they would have for dinner if given the chance. Responses ranged from professional athletes, hollywood stars, presidents, and classmates. If you were given the chance, who would your 5 people be?
Our afternoon time together was filled with the World Wars. We started our week by wrapping up our study around World War I by completing our viewing of “The Great War” documentary. Students were able to gain a lot of knowledge and participate in great discussions by viewing this movie. We discussed the reasons for the war, how war is different now, the impact a war can have on a country, and the power of war. By the middle of the week we began to build the bridge between the 1st and 2nd World Wars by reading an article all about the events leading up to the war. This article was certainly a complex text, rich in sentence variety and vocabulary. The classes participated in a great “Pause and Play” read aloud. During a “Pause and Play” read aloud, we read and pause our reading as necessary. We may stop to answer/ask questions, find the definition of a new term, find a country on a map, or simply summarize what was said in the paragraph just read. Students were able to interact with their text by taking notes, finding new vocabulary words, and highlighting specific dates or events. On Friday we launched our World War II unit by looking at a series of books about World War II, watching a slideshow, and doing a reflection/prediction of our studies to come.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week our mission was to decipher patterns in different tables to decide the mathematical relationship between “x” and “y”. We dusted off our notes on direct variation, exponential and inverse variations in order to interpret the relationship that we saw. Students took a partner quiz and had an orientation on Mobymax. Mobymax is an online math curriculum designed to target individual math needs. Your child is required to work on this program for 1 hour per week. The program will be assessed weekly as a practice grade. Students can receive a 4: for 60 minutes, 3: 50 minutes, 2: 40 minutes and a 1: 20-30 minutes. They will have some time during our extended Thursday class to work on this curriculum.
CMP7
Moving from unit rate tables, students began to form equations that modeled their tables. These proportional functions that we explored are called “direct variation” and form lines. The mathematical relationship between two variables which can be expressed by an equation in which one variable is equal to a constant times the other. Such as a situation where your babysitter gets paid $5.00 an hour: P= 5h.
Students took a partner quiz and had an orientation on Mobymax. Mobymax is an online math curriculum designed to target individual math needs. Your child is required to work on this program for 1 hour per week. The program will be assessed weekly as a practice grade. Students can receive a 4: for 60 minutes, 3: 50 minutes, 2: 40 minutes and a 1: 20-30 minutes. They will have some time during our extended Thursday class to work on this curriculum.
Science 7th/8th
This week 7th/8th graders are developing demonstrations to show thermal energy transfer. Their topics are conduction, convection, radiation, specific heat, conductors and insulators. Their mission is to teach the class through an interactive method that engages all in learning these concepts. It has been fun seeing them grapple with how to make their curriculum accessible and interesting.
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