TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Voyager Play: Humanimals- A classic version of good versus evil... A super hero squad vs. mad scientist and his creations
- Showtime: Thursday, Jan 21st 7:00pm (call time for cast is 6:30pm, 6:45pm for all other students) in WCS Auditorium
Be ready to be blown away!
_____________________________________________________________________
8th Grade Student & Parent Night - Wednesday, Jan 27th 6:30 - 8:30 pm in CVU Gym
This evening will provide you and your son/daughter an introduction to the academic and elective programs they will experience in the 9th grade at CVU.
**8th grade students received Course Registration paperwork at assembly Thursday afternoon and their Student School IDs, needed to register for classes, Friday.**
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
Students have been doing a lot of writing in our morning Humanities class. We started the week looking through our Writer’s Notebook for a seed idea that could become a good story with a week or so of work. Students then wrote a flash draft, fast and furious writing using the mental movie in their heads to write. The next day I challenged the students to put that draft aside and to write a whole new draft, focusing on the true, big meaning of their story. Students wrote the story differently by starting from another point, emphasizing different people, or telling the story out of order. We ended the week by selecting one of our drafts and creating story mountains for our narratives. Students used these questions to bring out the elements of their story: Do I have a character with a want or hope? Have I given my character a clear problem - and written some things that happened that are related to the problem? Does my story have a clear resolution?
Students will continue to use different writing techniques to fine tune their stories for a final draft to be due after the play unit.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Students began work this week on Unit 4 which addresses concepts related to multiplication and division of whole numbers and decimals. Students continue to use ratio tables as a key strategy for solving problems.
Math 6: Students finished the first investigation this week, a review of addition and subtraction of fractions and began conceptual knowledge building of fraction multiplication. Generalizations are already surfacing as we talk deeply about fraction of fraction problems. Rich discussions have led to some interesting ideas about the relationships between fraction of problems, multiplication, the dimensions of a rectangle and the area model.
⅚ Science: Students began some independent work on weather, learning the layers of the atmosphere through a reading and first drafting of a word map. Over the next month students will be making observations of weather for any 5 days of their choice in preparation for a visit from Sean Parker, meteorologist in the area.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
Our week started off with our usual independent reading time, where students were encouraged to read their current book for literature group which is, “The Giver”. All students in both 7th and 8th grade are reading this book in preparation for our viewing of the live performance at the Flynn Theater on February 17th. On Tuesday we continued our work for the Eyewitness to History Project. We reviewed and worked on our rough draft questions by discussing, “What makes a great question?” and “How do we ask questions that will lead us to the answers we need?”. Students were then encouraged to contact the person they were going to be interviewing to schedule a date and time for the interview to happen between now and January 26th. Wednesday and Thursday students were given time to work on their theater unit assignments such as the Week 2 journal write, theater vocabulary, and their sequence maps. On Friday we officially launched our 20th Century History Unit by building a massive timeline that will eventually span the walls of our classroom! We started this in-class project by watching the TED Talk about “Big History”. This introduced to the idea that learning about the history of our universe, our planet, and the human race is important to know and understand before we can start learning about our own history. After viewing the 18 minute video we had a discussion about the main points and the purpose of “Big History”. Most students found the video “mind-blowing” as it simplified many questions, ideas and theories we had heard before. The video also opened our ideas to how fragile and complex we and the world are. After discussing big history we asked ourselves: “So what have humans been doing with our fragile and complex world over the past 100 years?” We watched a quick video that time lapsed major events from 20th Century history, and we then broke into 5 groups to dig a little deeper into specific decades to build our class timeline! Our afternoons have been filled to the brim with work on this year’s Voyager play: Humanimals!
Week 2 of Humanimals:
Week 2 was filled with lots of work and we could finally see the play coming together. The cast has stopped using their script and we are now working on projection and focusing on the quick fixes. This week, we also started working with lights, sound, some props, and we finished all the backdrops as well. Thursday, we couldn’t use the auditorium due to an assembly so instead we fit costumes and worked on props instead. Thursday was also the one week away mark. I’m sure next week will be very stressful but it will all pay off for the performances on the 21st!!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
This week students began with a rousing “Stretching and Shrinking” Jeopardy game as a final review for our unit test. Tuesday and Wednesday we completed our test. We have begun our “Blow it Up and Shrink it Down” project with students creating scaled images of cartoons, logos and original drawings.
CMP8
This was a challenging week for our math students. We are in the thick of quadratic equations and we needed to take a pause to look at different equation forms and how they are generated. We hit a sticky “wicket” with a problem where students had to find the equation for the fixed perimeter of a rectangle using only the length as the “L” variable. Here is a view of the class record. We have worked through it and we are moving onto triangular numbers.
Science 7th/8th
This week students have a long term reading assignment and vocabulary on chemistry that is due January 25th! We will resume regular science classes once the play unit is over.
No comments:
Post a Comment