TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
February Winter Break:
No school Monday, Feb 22nd - Monday, Feb 29th. School resumes Tuesday, March 1st.
Thank you to everyone who donated food for our Voyager House breakfast this morning. The kids LOVED it and it really helped add to the exciting day at WCS today.
Have a fun & safe February Break!!
ALL Voyager Parents -- Save The Date!
The Voyager Recycle Sale is Saturday, March 26th! This is our biggest, most fun event of the year! A giant indoor yard sale!!!! Please start to gather anything you'd like to unload...household items, old artwork/posters, furniture, rugs, sporting equipment, books, toys, gently used jeans, dresses, jackets (any clothes must be clean, properly folded and ready to 'sell') costume jewelry, tools, working electronics. What a great activity for the upcoming February break! Spring cleaning!
All items can be dropped off at WCS on Friday, March 25th between 6 and 8 pm. The sale is
Saturday, March 26th, 9:00 am - 2:00 pm. If you are new to Voyager (parents of 5th graders, or new students) please make an effort to join us, this is a wonderful, community- building event and everyone has a blast. We'll have a bake sale, on-site DJ playing music. It draws a huge shopping crowd and has become a Williston tradition. It is a great way to clean out and recycle your unwanted items and find new treasures!!!
We will have a sign-up wiki set up during February. Please save the date and volunteer for a shift. Shifts are only 2-hours, so a great opportunity to help out! We'll also be sharing a poster soon that you can post/print and share with your friends. More to come!!! If you have any questions please feel free to contact me atapechaver@yahoo.com
Big Basket Raffle
Collections for the 16th Annual Big Basket Raffle and Silent Auction are underway! This is one of FAP’s biggest fundraisers of the year, with proceeds funding FAP programs that support all WCS and ABS students, families and staff. Items donated by our Williston School District families will be made into beautiful themed baskets that will be raffled off at the BIG BASKET RAFFLE on Saturday, April 2nd, 2016.
Merrill: Spice it Up!- Donation suggestions: Hot sauce, Spice rubs Gourmet salts, Salsa, BBQ sauce, Chutney, Cookbooks about spicy foods, dried hot peppers, and gift cards to Mexicali or any other restaurant with a spicy theme. Gift cards to specialty markets.
O’Brien: Sock it to Me!- Donation suggestions: Socks for all ages and occasions, Darn Tough socks, Ski socks, Basketball socks, running socks, funny theme socks, Sock Monkeys and Sock Dolls. Gift cards to places that sell socks, like Dick’s, The Sock Market, or any apparel shop.
Quatt: Spa Day- Donation suggestions: spa socks, lotions, hair towel, foot care set, candies, bubble bath, bath salt, hand soap, pedicure set, candles, bath fizzers, bath pillow, diffuser, massager, nail polish, tea, gift certificate to spa.
Wesnak: Games Galore- Donation suggestions: Card games, board games for all ages (Pictionary, Apples to Apples, Scrabble, Life, Candy Land, Clue, Cranium, etc.), dice games, book of card game rules, hand
held video games, gift card to stores like Toys R Us, Best Buy or Wal-Mart.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We had a nice trip to the Flynn this week to see a performance of The Giver. It was a one person performance that required a lot of imagination from the audience. The acting was great, but I think many students were expecting more from the experience. If you are looking for a movie to watch over the break, watching The Giver and having and a talk about how the book compares to the movie might be nice activity.
With theme week and the snow day, we had little time to wrap up the book and our study of Lewis and Clark. We had a couple of short lessons and activities on each. Students completed their storyboards for The Giver (part of their Reading Response Notebooks), and played a choose your own adventure online game of Lewis and Clark. They had to record and analyze their decisions as they played the game.
On Friday, the teachers and staff of Voyager hosted morning fun activities, between the Mardi Gras parade, assembly, and faculty/student basketball game. It was a very fun and full day. Be sure to ask your student about it.
Also, don’t forget that students should be reading 20-30 minutes per day. Make a trip to the library over the break, if your student does not have a good book!
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Students have done a marvelous job on this multiplication and division unit. I’ve been so impressed by this group’s commitment to learning and to each other. The unit assessment was given on Thursday.
Math 6: 6th Graders are bumbling through the fraction operations work and I’m finding confusion abounds!
Science ⅚: We did a few demonstrations this week in order to understand the role that air and water play in weather systems. We heated and cooled a model of the Earth with a heat lamp and then measured temperature over time on the equator, tropics and poles and found that the Earth doesn’t heat equally. This unequal heating drives air into motion and this causes weather. We also heated water and soil to see how quickly it heated up and cooled down. This moved us further forward by helping us understand that unequal heating of land and water also drive weather patterns. We made weather instruments on Monday and recorded data all week, adding further value to our understanding of wind speed, direction, temperature and air pressure affect weather systems. Quite a bit of work was collected this week. Jupiter Grades will be updated by break’s end.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities)
This week started off with our usual Independent Reading time in the morning. As the week continued on we finished up our work with identifying themes in “The Giver”. The final themes that we discussed were: Sameness vs. Diversity and Individuality. By looking at these themes we examined the utopian society/community of “The Giver” and discussed advantages, disadvantages, and how our differences make us distinctly human. We ended the week with students creating utopian societies and then voting as a class on the society they would most like to live in. On Friday we celebrated the conclusion of Theme Week with the Mardi Gras Parade and a Voyager Team Breakfast.
In the afternoon we continued to focus and work on our 1960’s graphic novels. Students all have accounts with Pixton, so they are all beginning to build and create their graphic novels. Students are having a lot of fun with the creative freedoms that come with Pixton, and they are really bringing their stories to life with great characters and backgrounds. They are even uploading pictures from the 1960’s (using Creative Commons) to bring authentic aspects of the time period to their stories. It has been a really fun week, and it all came to a close with the Staff vs. Student Basketball game on Friday afternoon! I hope everyone has a fantastic break!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
With the snow day, Flynn trip and Theme week activities, we had an abridged math week. Finding multiple ways to solve unit rates was the order of business and students worked together to find connect unit rates, with rate of change and linear equations. The Comparing and Scaling book is a short exploration that introduces a term called the “Constant of Proportionality” which is another name for the unit rate, slope and rate of change. This concept is an important one as we begin our study of linear equations. We will complete this unit after break. If students have some “free” time over the vacation, I would recommend doing some IXL work.
CMP8
In our abridged class this week we explored different types of functions called “Piecewise Functions” We looked at functions that are like steps, linear functions that have several rates of change and the absolute value function. The function notation or f(x) is very different from the equations forms we have seen. Here are two video links that explain what these functions are and how they are notated. When we get back from break we will return to some of our well-known functions and begin the exploration of function transformations.
Science 7th/8th
We pulled out the bunsen burners and ring stands to explore the physical property of boiling points and what happens when you add a solute to the universal solvent, water. How and why does adding salt or sugar to water change the boiling point? During the experiment we were able to utilize our new GoTemp temperature probes that allow us to accurately document temperature over time. Although we had a few mishaps with broken beakers and spills students were able to discern that by adding mass (sugar, salt) to the solvent (water) the boiling point was increased. Want to know why? This would be a great discussion to have over break or perhaps when preparing a pasta dinner. After break we will spend a few more weeks exploring chemical change.
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