TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Voyager is sponsoring the Book & Media Sale at the Craft Fair again, Saturday, Nov. 7th here at WCS. We can only make a profit if we have good merchandise to sell. Please start gathering books and other media (DVDs, Videos, Music CD's, old records, puzzles) and send them in with your students or place them in the large collection boxes located in front offices of both WCS and ABS. We are storing them in the Voyager Project room.
We also need volunteers to set-up and sell during the Craft Fair. Responsible students can help with this! We ask for at least one adult to be present during a block with students selling.
Please sign up here:
Dates to Remember:
December 9th: Voyager Family Night 6-8pm
March 26th: Voyager Recycle Sale
May 6th: Voyager Dance
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
Students are settling into our Reading Cafe Monday routine. Many students are able to “get lost” in their books and are building their reading stamina. In our literature group books, we focused on characterization this week. For our reading practice, students selected a character and read in character - this was a lot of fun. We also started to identify the scary characters and how the author reveals them to us.
We continued our Narrative writing work, learning about strategies for generating personal narratives and using them to write a story. Students are recording these strategies and techniques in their Writer’s Notebooks, and brainstorming ideas as well. By this point, students have 2 - 3 different stories that they have written in their notebooks. Sharing stories is always a great part of the class.
During our afternoon Humanities time, students took an assessment on the 5 Themes of Geography, matching themes to real geography situations. We also started a 5 Themes Google Slides project this week. Students were grouped by region and selected a state to make a theme based slide show. We spent some time in the library and online (using library electronic resources) researching with organizers due on Tuesday next week.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science)
Math 5: Students are working with ratio tables in very sophisticated ways. We have learned that the ratio table strategy is versatile enough to: solve multidigit multiplication problems, simplify fractions, answer questions like “what is the better buy?”, predict future values like if tomatoes cost $2.35 per pound, how much will it cost to get 5 pounds?, and find common denominators for fractions when one must add or subtract them. I
On Monday, students will be bringing home their first unit work. Please be looking for it. This will give you a chance to see actual unit assessments and entrance and exit tasks as well as all the other stuff.
Math 6: This week we began our new unit, Comparing Bits and Pieces. See the Parent site linked here: http://mymathuniverse.com/programs/cmp3/channels/8. This whole unit is on the bits and pieces or fractions of numbers. There is a strong emphasis on ratios. I will provide a lot of additional information to students on this topic. This week we began looking at “for every” statements as a way to compare numbers. For every 11 girls there are 10 boys. This statement compares the number of boys to the number of girls.
On Monday, students will be bringing home their first unit work. Please be looking for it. This will give you a chance to see actual unit assessments and entrance and exit tasks as well as all the other stuff.
⅚ Science: We completed our unit on electricity and magnetism and are now full steam ahead in a force and motion unit. Our anchoring phenomenon was this...students were invited to a fancy dining table arranged with glasses and plates and candlesticks and flatware. They are about to get down to business and eat their Thanksgiving dinner, when a man on a motorcycle backs up, ties the tablecloth to the back of the motorcycle and steps on the gas! He swipes the tablecloth out from beneath the dishware and the meal continues on! We all know this trick, but what is the science behind it? The unit will work to explain that phenomenon and many others! To begin...Students collected data on things in motion and worked to explain the question, how do you know that something is in motion? We then engaged in a stations approach to learning, but pushing and pulling, or applying forces, to things to put them into motion, or to cease motion. It was fun!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
This week we have been wrestling with positive and negative numbers and strategies to add and subtract them. We continue to utilize visual models and began to form rules for working with inverse operations. For example: When you add a number you can subtract it’s opposite and when you subtract a number you can add its opposite. Students played several fun card games including “25” where students added and subtracted positive (black) and negative (red) card values to get to 25. They also played positive and negative integer war in teams of two.
CMP8
8th graders explored the relationship between growth factors and growth rate by looking at population change and compounded interest. We compared exponential growth when starting values varied and utilized strategies to find the y intercept of our exponential functions when our tables began with an “x” value of 1. We looked at Vermont’s population and the very low growth rate of .02%. We figured that it would take over 3,400 years for Vermont to double it’s population at its present rate. Students began a partner quiz and finished the week with an exponent card game.
Science 7th/8th
We began the week with a quick review of meiosis and spent time investigating the Learn Genetics website through the University of Utah. We took a tour of all the components of genetics, including: DNA, chromosomes, genes, traits, proteins and heredity. We surveyed the class to see what dominant and recessive traits our class possessed like tongue rolling, eye color, hair color and many others. We discussed how traits are passed from parents to offspring. We graphed the class data to see the prevalence of specific traits in class. Finally, we completed an investigation on dragon inheritance. We selected chromosomes from a male and female dragon to produce a baby dragon with all sorts of traits, like horns, fire breathing, spiked tails and varied color.
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