Voyager Voice

TA’s Notes:

***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***

No School Nov 23rd - 27th

Have a wonderful & safe Thanksgiving!

Voyager House raised $856.67 at the Book & Media Sale Nov. 7th!!
Thank you to all students and parents who made this happen!

A special thank you to:

Ann Schmidt, Tess & Cullen Swett, Monica & Luisa Hutt, Alex Ulanov, Quinn & Sandy Connolly, Michelle & Kylie Pierce, Parker Soares, Kary & Laurynn Bombardier, Gavin Schaaf, Leigh Samuels, Deanna & Joey Merola, Cathy & Sam Clear, Sarah & Emma Kim and Addison & Jackie Urch.

Dates to Remember:

December 9th: Voyager Family Night 6-8pm

March 26th: Voyager Recycle Sale

May 6th: Voyager Dance

Ms. Sherman:

Your 8th grade son or daughter will be bringing home some paperwork regarding the end of the year 8th grade trip. Bringing back in this paper work is crucial to us securing the dates with the travel company. While all the details of the itinerary are still in the works, we are travelling on June1st and returning on June 3rd. In order to secure these dates we will need deposits from all students that are going to be in attendance. Please take a look at the forms and send them back in as soon as possible. We are so excited about this trip and spending some quality time with such a great group of kids in Canada!!!!!!

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

Thank you for all of the great book donations from the book fair. I am looking forward to having a book share when we return from the break and offering the books to the students to borrow from our classroom library.

This week…

Monday:

Reading Cafe - We went to the library for book talks and an opportunity to sign out books for the break.

Current Events - Students cut out significant stories from the Burlington Free Press and wrote summaries to add to our Current Events Google Map.

Tuesday:

We started organizing our Scary LEAF writing from our literature group book. Students gathered evidence from their Reading Response Notebooks and the book to show how the setting and characters made the book scary. We also wrapped up a couple of geography lessons on map projections and watersheds.

Wednesday:

We focused on techniques for writing a creative lead and convincing finisher for our Scary LEAF. In the afternoon, students tested their engineering prototypes for the competition on Thursday.

Thursday:

Self assessment time - students self assessed their independent reading skills, Reading Response Notebooks, and Writer’s Notebooks for the first trimester. They also typed, revised, and edited their Scary LEAF. In the afternoon, we had a race to find, locate, and list the most landforms from an interactive US map.

Friday:

This morning after a final edit, students self assessed their Scary LEAF and passed them in. They also had a second chance to show how many states they can locate on a US Map. Students took their first try one month ago. Both US Maps will be coming home with reports.

This afternoon students put together our Thanksgiving donation baskets and added a thankful note to our Voyager wall.

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

⅚ Science: It has been a busy and messy week. Rubberbands, hot glue, and a lot of forces and motion at work in our classroom! We hosted the second annual WCS Engineering Challenge yesterday and it was great! Dan Fleming, the engineer that works in our classroom weekly, and often daily, was one of the judges for a day long look into the solutions to four problems related to objects in motion (egg bungee, rubberband car, marshmallow catapult, and zipline). Most impressive was the attitude and focus of students all week for this challenge. Students worked together to construct a prototype solution to the problem and tested their ideas all week using good engineering practice, like collecting data, making improvements, discussing changes, and redesigning for a whole new cycle of testing again. It was great. If you didn’t see the livestream or the actual event, we have captured some moments below.

Math 5: We have been working our way through the early lessons of Unit 3, all about fractions and decimals. I’m so excited about place value, like someone might be about ice cream! I think that the gaps we see in learning at the 5th grade level are often related to gaps in understanding about place value. This is certainly just an opinion but I often relish the opportunity to get to place value because it build number sense. A student’s ability to be flexible and fluid with numbers makes teaching operations, or algebraic reasoning, simpler. So on with it...We are digging into the numbers to the right of the decimal point, those numbers that are fractions of one. We are working on things like Are all threes equal in the number, 33.3333 and why not? Or what happens when you multiply a number by ten or divide it by ten? Does the trick, add a zero, work with decimals? It has been productive week of investigations similar to the ones described above. Lots of fun and a few Ah ha’s this week!

Math 6: We have expanded on the idea of comparison statements by just referring to them as ratios and rates. Students have worked on building a sense of unit rates, ratios in which one of the numbers is a one, and using those ratios to solve real world problems. We tested and tasted lemonade recipes this week, discussed food labels and recipes, and investigated other ratios that come up in our every day. This jump to ratios, and the inherent need to think multiplicatively, can be hard for a student who thinks in addition. We are encourage multiplicative reasoning through development of ratio tables, setting up equivalent ratios side by side and looking at scale factor, and solving which is the better buy problems. We are halfway through the book, so there is more to learn!