TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
REPORT CARDS WENT HOME TODAY!
Voyager's Annual Family Night and Talent Show - December 9th, 6 - 8pm!!
We do ask that families bring a small snack to share, based on the core class your child is in or to please donate a raffle prize. Such prizes in the past have been movie tickets, gift cards or any sort of small treat.
Sign up sheet is here:
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
On Monday we started off with our Reading Cafe; students were reading deeply with an independent book. In the afternoon, we introduced the National Geo Bee competition and took the WKET News Quiz.
We kicked off our folktale literature group round on Tuesday. Students participated in a Literature Circle, taking one of 4 roles: Discussion Director, Literary Luminary, Vocabulary Enricher, and Checker. Students will rotate through a new folktale each week and take on a new role in the circle with each new story. By Friday we finished our first round.
We also had a great US Geography Jeopardy Game in preparation for the Geo Bee Competition. Students competed in 7 rounds of questions in the Geo Bee - from states to countries around the world. The winner will represent Voyager ⅚ in the school wide Geo Bee competition.
Our school wide booster cell challenge this month is improving our behavior while obtaining peer attention. We had a class discussion on Friday morning on this social thinking skill, as well a fun activity to practice it.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
During our morning classes this week we started to get back into our classroom routines by starting off the week with independent reading. We then moved through our week with a variety of journal writes, and we began our mini grammar unit. We will be focusing on sentence variety and the 4 different types of sentences, along with studying verbs, adverbs, and practicing our verb consistency. Our journal writes this week were focused around winter themes such as snow globes and snow!
For our afternoon classes this week we started building up to our next mini research project which is focused on the question of: How has Vermont made an impact on the world? Students will be studying a variety of topics from products to people to places to businesses, that have made an impact not only on our state and community, but on the world. They will be writing an informational LEAF paragraph and then working with small groups to create a tourism marketing project. Some groups are creating videos, iMovie trailers, or A-Z books about Vermont. We spent our week researching important businesses, people, places, products, and events from Vermont that have made an impact on the world. We then watched a few Vermont Tourism videos to gain ideas and inspiration for our projects and writing pieces.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
This week students explored similarity of geometric figures. We measured angles, side lengths, calculated perimeter and area of rectangles and squares to see what attributes make figures similar. Students explored scale factor when creating images. We had the opportunity to draw some Mug Wumps, a cartoon character on a coordinate grid. We explored “rules” that transformed our original character into similar and skewed images. Finally, we began a new online math program called IXL. This online program allows students to work on a variety of Common Core math skills related to the books we are learning.
CMP8
Square roots, cube roots but not root vegetables! This week we continued our investigations in “Looking for Pythagoras”, by exploring perfect squares, perfect cubes and how to use our graphing calculator to find roots. We also did a lot of estimating of where non-perfect square numbers fell on the number line. Near the end of the week, we began in earnest to explore where the Pythagorean Theorem came from and how and why it makes sense. Finally, we returned to using IXL the online math program that we trialed at the beginning of the year. This online program allows students to work on a variety of Common Core math skills related to the books we are learning.
Science 7th/8th
Students passed in their engineering lab reports this week and we put closure on competition. The 7th/8th graders had fabulous designs, redesigns and huge amounts of data, but we were not able to bring any wins to Voyager. However, I must say that Voyager was well represented with excellent designs that showed ingenuity and effort. Kudos to our hardworking 7th/8th grade scientists.
This week also began our exploration of adaptations, natural selection and evolution. Students read about Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle in the 1830’s, defined vocabulary, took notes on Brainpop videos, discussed recent findings about homo naledi a recent hominin species found in a deep cave in South Africa. The current thinking places this species as living somewhere around 1.5 to 2 million years ago.
We rounded off the week with a simulation called “The Battle of the Beaks” where our students become bird species with different beaks and fought for limited food resources. We discussed what could happen over time as environmental changes put pressures on the organisms living within it.
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