Week of January 5th - 9th

TA’s Notes:

Family Night was a huge success!  Thank you to all students who participated with very entertaining acts, to those who donated fabulous raffle gifts, families who contributed to FAP, all of the supporting fans in the audience and Leigh Samuels for organizing this terrific event!  THANK YOU!

The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):

We have had an exciting week here in Voyager. Our regular morning classes have been in full swing, but our afternoons have been spent kicking off and preparing for our Voyager Games next week (see email sent home by your core teacher).  On Monday we had Reading Cafe, students read and talked about the most important/interesting part of the book they are reading. On Tuesday, students responded to a prompt for our Voyager Games Unit in their Writer’s Notebooks. The prompt was - What does it take to survive a difficult situation? Following the writing session, we had a large number of students share their writing and discuss the prompt.

Our librarian, Karen Hennig also visited, and introduced the Reading as an Investment program that will be running through the month of January. We will be participating in this program and more information will be sent home next week. We also started the school-wide read aloud of Rules by Cynthia Lord. The book focuses on the big themes of compassion, accepting differences and friendship and supports our school wide efforts to help students grow to become good citizens and people. Our study of informational text and writing focused on text structures - specifically cause and effect. Students learned and practice how to identify cause and effect in an article on the drought situation out west.

The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):

Math 5:  This week we dove more deeply into decimals and sorted out the Great Wall of Base Ten.  Understanding our Base Ten Number System seems easy, but it is one complex task for students.  Knowing how one place value is different from another requires a lot of modeling and conversation about how numbers changes as they are multiplied or divided by 10.  We modeled decimal value with base ten pieces, played a game called Minimal Collection in order to show how you can trade a collection of base ten pieces for others, so that you end up with the fewest base ten pieces possible.  We also wrote decimals, practiced saying decimals, and did a few activities with multiplying by powers of ten.

Math 6: Sixth graders continued work adding and subtracting decimals, assessed in this skill area and began working with fraction of fraction problems.  Today we modeled problems like ½ of 8 and ½ of ½ searching for generalizations for these kinds of problems and we made some really valuable observations that will lead to generalizations from these kinds of problems.  

⅚ Science:  This week, I was in charge of workshops related to our survival week.  Without giving too much away about next week’s competition, I facilitated discussions on and testing of insulators, built an insulated box for a 20 oz. can, introduced simples machines and had students engineer a hand cranked crane.  These skills and understandings with be part of next week’s challenges in the outdoors.  

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):

This week Humanities has only been meeting during the morning. We have been using this time to participate in the school-wide read aloud of the book, Rules by Cynthia Lord. This book focuses on big themes such as compassion, accepting others, and relationships with friends and family. This week our focus was on getting to know the characters and understanding who they are, why they act the way they do, and why they might feel the way they feel. We are learning that all of our characters are very complex. All of the characters are multi-layered, which means with every page we learn something new and this leads to the students coming to class eager to start our read aloud! Every morning students have been coming to class and participating in a discussion or activity based on the previous day’s reading. This discussion or activity is also centered around their Reading Responses from the previous night’s homework assignment. The conversations, ideas, and character mapping we have done so far has been fantastic. We are about halfway through the book and students are really loving it. They are being active listeners and making great predictions! Next week we will be continuing our read aloud, discussions, and reading activities.

The Voyager Games - 8th Grade Research Lab:

During our time together students have been learning about the following while taking notes and completing drawings/diagrams:

• What qualities does it take to be a great leader?
• How do I think differently about the use of an everyday object and how do I use it in a Winter survival situation?
• How do I deal with tough situations like: “What if a team member is cold?” “What if a team member refuses to participate?”
• How do other animals adapt and survive the winter and how can I simulate that?

8th graders were also given secrets, clues, and hints to next week’s challenges! They also tested their strength in the cold weather, learned how to thaw a frozen candy bar, and even did some team bonding! Energy has been high, behavior has been focused and respectful, and the note-taking has been well done. To conclude, some of the students have said that this unit has been, “the best thing I’ve ever done in school.” Have a great weekend!

The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):

CMP8

The 8th grade students began dissecting quadratic equations and graphs.  When we graphed a quadratic function, we looked for landmarks like the line of symmetry, the x intercepts and the maximum or minimum point.  Using the algebra tiles, we created a model for both a factored and expanded form of a quadratic expression. We practiced the F.O.I.L. method for factored forms to expanded forms and then did the opposite of taking an expanded form and converting it into the factored form.    We rounded off the week with creating a class record on what we have learned so far.

CMP7

This week we continued our work on our “Blow it Up and Shrink it Down” project. A project focused on recreating images that are scaled up, down and skewed.  The final products are due on Monday.  We will have the finished projects hanging in our room over the next month.  Come on in and see them!  We also began a new unit called “Comparing and Scaling”, which investigates ratios, rates, percentage and proportions.

Survival Workshops

In my survival workshops students built and tested Supercat stoves made from cat food cans.  We tested different patterns of holes and how quickly the stove was able to bring 2 cups of water to a boil.  Student also learned about finding suitable drinking water, pathogens that can be found in water, how to create an emergency filter, and ways to purify water if you have limited materials.  These skills will be helpful for next week’s survival challenges.