TA’s Notes:
SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) Testing Schedule:
7th & 8th graders- April 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th & 8th
5th & 6th graders- April 30th, May 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th & 7th
Please have students get a full night’s sleep prior to testing days, eat a good breakfast and be ready to come to school to try their best! A sign-up sheet to bring in healthy snacks throughout testing times will be e-mailed out next week. We understand that the 7/8 testing window overlaps with the school Musical, so we will have makeup times for those involved.
WillistonRuns! for Education
Calling all runners, walkers, riders- let’s build some Voyager House spirit and get together for some fun on Saturday, May 16th at the WillistonRuns event!!!
WillistonRuns! is a 5k run sponsored by FAP to benefit all the kids in Williston schools. You can run it, walk it or ride it but the most exciting option this year is the 5k team event.
Voyager House would like to put together as many 3-person teams as we can to run the 5K race; we can invent some crazy team names, wear crazy team costumes and have some crazy fun, beating out all the other houses to win the “House with the Most Teams” or the “House with the Fastest Team” title. We want Voyager House to sweep the event!
Last year the event raised over $2,700 to support field trips and classroom enrichment. This year we want to be part of raising even more. Let’s show our Voyager House team spirit and register some teams!
For more info and for online registration, check out the website here: http://willistonruns.org/
Paper registration forms are also available at the front office at WCS.
Thanks and let’s get moving!
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WCS Dialogue Night: Wednesday, April 1st 6:00- 7:45pm in WCS Dining Room
Ever wonder what middle schooler kids REALLY think about …feeling a sense of belonging, peer pressure, mean behavior, binge drinking, inhalants, tobacco, teen depression… Here is your chance to find out! For the pizza part of the evening, 6-6:15PM, please RSVP to Sarah, SAP Counselor, sklionsky@cssu.org or 871-6079, by Monday 3/30
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FAPAC March Meeting Highlights
The FAP Advisory Council held its monthly meeting on March 12th. Please check the full minutes on the school website in a PDF format by clicking HERE. Below are a few meeting highlights:
Big Basket Raffle Fundraiser and Fun Night on Saturday, March 28th: One Week to Go — Thank you for all your donations to the classroom baskets. Baskets will be collected from classrooms on Friday, March 20th and transformed into the beautiful wrapped baskets that are raffled off on Saturday, March 28th. Doors for this event open at 6:00 p.m. This is an Adult-Only Event. Fun Night, sponsored by Full House, is taking place the same night for children in grades K-4; registration info has been in the School Bell and is in both Main Offices. There are still some spots available on the sign-up sheet for the Basket Raffle; specifically, we need help selling raffle tickets, bringing in items for our refreshment table, and cleaning up at the end of the evening. If you can help with any of these things, please go to this SIGN UP LINK
Jump Rope for Heart on Friday, March 27th — WSD's annual Jump Rope for Heart will take place at Allen Brook School the morning of Friday, March 27 from 8:45-11:15 am. Participating WCS students will be bused to ABS in the morning and brought back to WCS after the event is over. Children in grades 1-8 can participate in the event. Signed permission slips should be handed in to a physical education teacher. Registration deadline is Friday, March 20 or when we reach the maximum capacity of 375 students (whichever comes first).
Online Donations to Annual Fund — the online feature for making donations to the Annual Fund will not be available after March 31st. You can still send checks in through the Main Offices or the House T.A.s. The online feature will resume for the start of the next school year.
Voyager’s Giant Indoor Sale on Saturday, March 21st — Shop tables full of donated treasures! Household goods, Clothing, Accessories, Sports Equipment, Toys, Art, Electronics, Collectibles & More! Food Concessions too! On Saturday, March 21st 9am - 2pm at Williston Central School's Cafeteria. Please donate items to the sale on Friday March 20, 6-8 pm. Clean out your clutter and help students at the same time! To help out at this event sign up HERE
Special thanks to the Variety Show Committee (Shelley Forrest, Danielle Trasciatti-Holmberg, Susan Willis) for organizing an amazing show on Friday, March 13th. And kudos to all the individuals who performed in the show! It was a great evening of entertainment. Such a talented community we have!!!
Consider attending one of our meetings. Meetings are the 2nd Thursday of every month at 8:15 am in the WCS Dining Room. Thanks.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week in AM Humanities, students continued their Narrative Writing piece. Students were asked to write a short narrative that takes place during the American Revolution, to strengthen their knowledge of that time period. Students created a plot map of their stories, and created a character that they would like to write about. We began writing our narratives, and will hopefully finish them up next week.
In PM Humanities, students continued learning about the American Revolution. This week, we focused on the Declaration of Independence, it’s meaning, and it’s importance. Students also re-wrote the opening of the declaration in their own words. We also introduced the American Revolution class project, a digital freedom trail! Students will work in small groups to research a relevant topic or person, and will create a website that teaches other students about their topic. We will then use QR codes and iPads to create a digital learning experience for students to explore!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in Humanities has been focused on starting our Personal Narratives/Memoirs and finishing up our World War 2 Point of View projects.
Our morning times together were spent completing a few journals writes to practice our memoir writing skills! Students were encouraged to use their 5 senses to trigger memories and expand their writing. We completed journal writes inspired by smell, taste, sound, and touch. Students took multiple trips down memory lane sharing funny, meaningful, and detailed stories of small moments from their past. By the end of the week all students had completed a timeline of their life, picked an event to write about for their memoir/personal narrative, and began completing their outlines. We reviewed the expectations for the writing piece on Friday, and we also reviewed the due dates. Students were told that this is a writing project, meaning that it has two parts. Part 1 is to complete the memoir, and Part 2 is to complete an iMovie connected to the memoir. The iMovie will be a series of pictures to illustrate the story (photos from the actual event or photos found online to help illustrate the event) with the audio being a read aloud by the author of the memoir itself. All of this work will be shared at our “What is my Story?” showcase that will be happening right before the April Break. It is always such a treat to read these stories, but even more meaningful to hear the students tell them!
Our afternoons have been completely dedicated to the World War 2 Point of View Project. Students have really been taking this project to the next level. The classroom is currently smelling of coffee and tea from students staining their papers to look old! We have piles of costumes from the WCS drama closet that students have found to wear for their presentations. I have been extremely impressed by the dedication, creativity, and care students have been putting into this work. It’s not an easy task to bring together the events of a world war, but students have been using an array of resources from their own research notes taken in February, class handouts provided, Jr. Scholastic articles, and of course the powers of Google. This project is always so amazing to see in its completion because students are able to represent a variety of perspectives to tell the complete story of World War 2.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
Due to the concert schedule, we had an abridged week of math. This week we looked a little more closely at the relationships parent functions and how changing the parts of the equation allow it to flip, stretch, and slide up and down and side to side. We played a fun game of function jeopardy and ended the week with the Function Junction Unit Test.
CMP7
This class was also impacted by the concert schedule, so we reviewed some old material before forging on to new investigations. We looked at the meaning of a solution set between two linear functions and how to write a linear equation from the y-intercept and single coordinate point. Students finished the week with a Moving Straight Ahead Partner Quiz.
Science 7th/8th
The beginning of the week brought a summation of our WCS engineering challenge. Students complete their final reflections and handed in their engineering templates. We got things “rolling” with our new unit by looking at waves. Using springs and rope we explored transverse and longitudinal waves. Students received vocabulary and readings for this unit and we dabbled in exploring the properties of light.
The Week in Ms. O’s Class
Math 5: Sorry for the delay in the update. I was in an engineering class all day Friday and Saturday and am just coming up for air! Students spent their week making secure their skills with the standard algorithm for multiplication and beginning work with conceptual understanding of division. Moby Max is an expectation for the week (Mon-Sun) so please check in with your child about their 1 hour expectation.
Math 6: Sorry for the delay in the update. I was in an engineering class all day Friday and Saturday and am just coming up for air! Students focused on tables and graphs this week and searched for what we call regularity in math. What are the relationships between tables and graphs? What can a table tell us that maybe a graph cannot (at least not directly)? What are the advantages of a graph over a table? And the regularity in math would be...what is true about both tables and graphs and their relationships to each other? We did jumping jacks and situps to collect data and reinforce graphings skills and learned about the coordinate grid. The book involves a lot of graphing...you’ll hear the uggghhhs at home. It’s a good thing to practice, I promise!
Science ⅚: We began our next unit, Properties of Matter, and had some interesting days of investigations with water. Students watched an engage video in which a man pops a water balloon and captures the pop on a high speed camera and wondered, why does the water hold together? We then observe water on wax paper, hanging from a dropper and in a glass beaker (with a drop of food dye added) in order to determine, what makes water, water? By investigating water in these ways we were able to come together, in a scientists’ meeting, to discuss what we know about the nature of water. I audiotaped one of the two meetings and will make this available for your listening pleasure, as a way for you to see just how bright all of these kiddos are! To be posted soon...
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