TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Picture Retakes: Morning of Monday, October 19th
Voyager House Needs You!!
We are still looking for at least 2 other fabulous volunteers to round out our FAP reps. Responsibilities of this role shared by others is:
Organizing the Voyager Media Sale- November 7th
Assisting with Voyager Night- December evening
Overseeing the Recycle Sale in spring
Creating a successful May 6th Voyager sponsored dance
The success of Voyager House depends on and appreciates parent support and these events are all fun and exciting experiences for Voyager students and their families!
Please contact Katie Fieldsend if interested in learning how you can help!
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We continued to make progress on our read aloud of I Am Malala. Students were also expected to do some reading of the book independently. I have been really impressed with the engagement and interest the students have with this book. We will be wrapping up the book next week.
For our current events activity, students learned about the differences between local, national, and international news events. Students searched through newspapers to find examples of each. We also created our own Current Events Google Map, marking the locations, including a title and a one sentence summary of the event. We will add events to this map throughout the school year.
Students also completed their first on demand writing assessment. The prompt was to write about something you feel strongly about and defend your position. These papers will be scored using a district rubric. The activity will be repeated in the spring.
We started our geogrpaphy unit on Wednesday. Students were introduced to the 5 themes of geography. We will be diving deeper into each theme over the next couple of weeks and our study will wrap up with a project that will use all 5 themes.
- I will not be available on Wednesday, October 7 for after school help.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Students continued to practice multiplication strategies this week on real world examples, like Sam’s Sewing Supplies and Lily’s Lacrosse balls. It has been good to reinforce the value of a ratio table in solving BEST BUY problems and problems where the numbers are a little less friendly, like 47 x 36. We also examined the differences between numerical expressions and equations. The distinction becomes very important in algebra so it was a worthwhile set of conversations. Final quiz on the unit was today! Lot of work to do on my part, so please look forward to updates on J grades by weekend’s end!
Math 6: Our deep exploration into the use of prime factorizations resulted in some claims about numbers that were new to the discussion we have been having in class. Specifically, we prime factorized to find all the factors of a number. This helps students strengthen multiplication skills and see that all numbers are unique (no other numbers share the same set of factors). Factorizations also help us find common factors in problems where we are trying to figure out fair share problems. Also, we discovered that factorizations help us find Greatest Common Factors and Least Common Multiples of a given pair of numbers. We went back to ferris wheels, cicadas, and trail mix problems to rethink our ideas about those problems based on this new factorization understanding. The question about whether primeness or compositeness might influence the strategies we use when finding GCF and LCM surfaced. Yes, these properties matter when searching for GCF and LCM.
Important: The Special Number Project has been assigned with graphic organizer and rubric. Graphic organizer is due on Tuesday and the children’s book is due on October 26th. Please ask your Voyager what story they are modeling his/her math book after and help them get the ball rolling! See Google Classroom.
Science ⅚: Motors, motors, and generators! We had a busy week of exploration of motors and generators. Your Voyager is smart! They discovered that motors, which transform electrical energy into mechanical energy, can be reversed to become a generator (transforms mechanical energy into electrical energy). See photos below.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
Tweet the Week:
- Hunger Games Lit; UN debate coming soon; Bowl of fate!
- #UnitedNations #HungerGames #Journaling
- Journal Writes; #GlobalGoals; Model U.N.
- #U.N.Debate Getting ready!
- #HungerGames #GlobalGoals - Be a Global Citizen!
- Model UN, #GlobalGoals, Hunger Games
- We soared through AM Humanities with “The Day of the Pelican”
- #DayOfThePelican #ModelU.N. - Can’t wait!, #UNDebate, #Peacemakers
- This week: GlobalGoals, Day of the Pelican, Country Select
- Day of the Global Pelican #Goals
- #GlobalGoalsWithSelfies
This week during our AM classes we started the week with our usual Literacy Rotations on Monday. We also started some great work on a creative art installation with MC Baker that we will be unveiling at an Open House Night in November. We are keeping this project under wraps (even for the students) until November, so we are working away piece by piece. On Tuesday we had a peer edit for our Peacemaker LEAF, and the final draft was due on Friday. Bridging the gap between Tuesday and Friday we spent our classes preparing for the first literature book for our morning classes. Our first unit of literature study is focusing on the theme of social justices and injustices. Our 7th graders will be reading “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, and our 8th graders will be reading “The Day of the Pelican” by Vermont’s own, Katherine Paterson.
During our afternoon classes we continued our work on learning about the United Nations by kicking off the week by learning about the Global Goals for Sustainable Development that were adopted by the United Nations starting on Friday, September 25th. The hope is to achieve these goals by 2030! Our students took on the challenge of spreading the word to EVERYONE about the Global Goals by identifying one goal they are passionate about, creating a poster, and taking a picture of themselves with the poster and their goal group. These pictures will be shared through the Voyager Voice and displayed on the television screen in the front lobby of our school to help spread the word about the Global Goals. Still wondering what the Global Goals are? Take a look at this quick video: We The People For The Global Goals . During the rest of the week, we spent 2 class periods doing some station based learning on the United Nations by reading a variety of articles and answering questions in our writing journals. On Thursday and Friday our focus turned to our Model United Nations Debate unit! Students picked the countries they wished to represent. Students also began research to complete their country’s national profile through a document in Google Classroom. We have not released the debate topics yet, as we are focusing on building our background knowledge first. Students are getting really excited, and we are counting down the days to the debates! Debates will take place, with students dressed in “business attire”/ “professional attire”, in the WCS dining room in about 2 weeks!!
And now...some Global Goals:
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
This week students explored side lengths of triangles and the relationship between angle measures. There was a lot of discussion about why side lengths of a triangle have to be a certain length. We explored triangles using manipulatives called polystrips. These tools allowed us to construct triangles to see what lengths work and what lengths do not. There has been a lot of conjecture, but we are not quite in consensus with our thinking. At the end of the week we began a geometry construction lab. Using protractors and angle rules, students constructed triangles, polygons and angles. They also worked through problems that were both new and review. Students received their first assessment back called a “Check-up”.
CMP8
Inverse variation, what it is, what it looks like in a table, graph and equation was the order of business this week. An inverse variation is a function that resembles a curve. In this function the x and y can be multiplied to find a constant (k). For instance, if you have a fixed area of a rectangle set at 36 cm2, you could have a variety of lengths and widths, but when they are multiplied by each other they equal 36. So you could have dimensions like 1 x 36, 2 x 18, 3 x 12 etc. In this function as the length increase the y decreases. We will be completing this investigation over the next week.
Science 7th/8th
Students completed their scaled cell models this week. There were lots of varieties and lots of scales. A common scale was 1 micron = .5 centimeters. Students took the microscopic organelles to a level that could be seen and understood. There was some beautiful work done and they will be displayed on the house for the next week. From our models of “cells” we turned to specialized cells and tissues. We have the fortune of great microscopes and slides and students drew sketches of blood, bone, muscle, lung, veins and arteries. The emphasis was on the form of these cells and tissues and what function they perform in our body. Students also had readings on chemical compounds in cells and how materials transport in and out of cells. The 7th/8th grade scientists are getting very proficient at using the microscope!
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