TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
FAP NOTES:
Hello All Voyager Families and Faculty,
Happy New Year and I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday with your families! I apologize for getting the minutes out so late to you. Below are the highlights from the December FAP meeting along with a link to the full minutes. The full minutes include Principal Marino's presentation to the FAP about the current budget and the difficulties they are facing. I urge you to read this information as there has been a fair amount of misinformation on various forms of social media! Also, please note that although the link to donate to the Annual Fund is no longer active, you can still donate by check. As of our last meeting, less than 30% of Voyager families have contributed to this fund. All of our children benefit from this fund. PLEASE consider contributing. No amount is too small. Thanks! -Amy Armstrong
FAPAC December 2015 Meeting Highlights Information- The FAP Advisory Council held its monthly meeting on December 10th. FAP is Williston's equivalent of a parent-teacher organization. We meet each month, our meetings our open to all, and you will receive an email like this every month with highlights of the meeting and a link to the FAP website for the full minutes. Check the full minutes in a PDF format by clicking HERE. Below are a few meeting highlights:
Administration Report: Greg Marino, District Principal, spoke about the budget impacts of Act 46 on the Williston school district. The administration is currently creating a plan for budget cuts to meet the allowable growth percentage set forth through the law. There are two upcoming Williston School Board budget working sessions open to the public to hear more on this topic. They are Dec. 21st at 5:30 pm, and Jan. 11th at 4:30 pm both in the WCS Dining Room.
The CSSU Act 46 Study Committee is working on the consolidation portion of the law, has a website for all the materials and information regarding this, and an e-mail address of act46@cssu.org.
Williston Annual Fund: This fund pays for your children's school field trips, among other educational items. Without this fund, class fundraisers, such as selling wrapping paper, would need to occur. Please continue to send in checks or cash to your class if you have not already done so. Any amount you can send helps!
School Board Position Openings: There are two school board positions opening up for vote in March. Please consider running for these positions and contact Kevin Mara for more information! kmara@cssu.org
Our next meeting is on Thursday, January 14th at 8:15 am at Williston Central School. We hope you can attend!!!
Please contact me at amyarmstrong@hotmail.com if you have feedback or questions on FAP. Thanks.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We are starting our 5-8 Theatre Unit this week! The play was written by a few of our ⅞ students. We will be performing the play on Thursday, January 21. See below for more information and updates. Students will be working on 3 theatre related assignments during the unit. We reviewed the assignments and students should have a good start on each one. A journal entry (via Google Classroom) will also be due at the end of each week of the unit. During the unit, we will be working on the play every afternoon and running our regular morning schedule (Humanities and Math).
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: The focus for the week was on multidigit division. Students are building models for division using Base Ten Pieces. Students are making relationships between the division bracket, the three parts of a division problem (dividend, divisor, and quotient) and the area model for division (dimensions and area).See the relationships students made below.
Math 6: Students began the new book for the year, Let’s Be Rational. It is very much an extension unit to Comparing Bits and Pieces, pushing on computational strategies for fractions. Although addition and subtraction are not new, the goal of the first investigation is to become proficient in adding and subtracting fractions. This book does not deal with decimal operations, but my goal for students is that whole number computation, especially multiplication and division are proficient before the end of this unit in anticipation of the decimal operations book. We are at the point of using standard algorithm, so don’t be afraid to pop in a few multidigit problems here and there. Standard algorithm is Mom and Dad’s way! It’s finally here!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
We are officially in our Theater Unit, so we are only having Humanities in the morning. This week our morning classes started off with some time for independent reading. As our week moved forward we started our work on the Eyewitness to History project. Students will be interviewing a family member, teacher, or family friend who was witness to a historic event. At this point students are only responsible for having found a person to interview, doing basic research to gain background knowledge on the event they will be interviewing about, and writing their rough draft questions for the actual interview. We will be workshopping the questions and discussing, “What makes a great question?” early next week. Interviews should be taking place at the end of next week or early the following week. Once interviews are finished students will be transcribing the interview and applying their knowledge from our grammar unit on verb tenses, adverbs, and verb tense consistency. The expectation is that students are not only practicing their speaking and conversational skills, but they are also telling the story of one person from a specific time or event in history. This is our opening project for the 2nd trimester and is our launch for the BIG question: How does the written word change our perspective of history and light the path to our global future?
At the end of the week we had the Geography Bee! All students competed in class to get a place in the Williston Central School Geo Bee. We have a finalist for 7th and 8th grade, and they will complete the tiebreaker round on Monday morning to fill the spot of our 7/8 Voyager rep!
Humanials - Week 1 of the Voyager House Theater Unit!
This week’s voice from Student Director and Writer: Maeve!
This week has been a very exciting week. After we announced the play before our break and held auditions on the 21st of December, we finally started the preparation for Humanimals. On Monday, we went over who had what part and assigned groups to people who weren’t acting. We went over jobs and let's just say a lot more goes into creating a play than just acting. We also have set designers, props, costumes, lights, sound and stage crew. Every person has a job and contributes to the full production. The rest of the week has been hard work trying to do as much reading and blocking as we can. The lights and sound people are busy working on teaching the new learners how to work the machinery. The props are being the made, the costumes are being imagined and the set designers are making our setting come to life. As you can see, our first week was very productive. More to come about our work. Make sure to mark your calendars for January 21st!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
This week the 7th graders explored indirect measurement using shadows and reflections from two figures that form similar right triangles. We worked on our continued understanding of what makes figures similar in relation to corresponding side lengths and scale factor. We rounded off our week with station rotations on the major topics in our unit. Next week we will have our unit assessment and begin our “Blow it up and Shrink it down” project.
ck12 website
CMP8
We are in the thick of quadratic equation fun in the 8th grade. We have learned to move from factored form to expanded expanded form using the F.O.I.L method (distributive property). Students have also explored how to create an area model that shows both the factored and expanded form. We finished the week by looking at the two forms of quadratic equations and what landmarks we can see within the graph.
Science 7th/8th
Over the next few weeks students will be completing a lengthy reading that overviews the concepts we will be exploring in chemistry. Students have also been asked to define and illustrate chemistry terms.
No comments:
Post a Comment