TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Greetings Team Voyager!
Voyager Families- Please start saving any and all items to donate to Voyager’s Recycle Sale!
Save The Date: Sale is March 26th
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.
It's time to register your girls for Girls on the Run (grades 3-5) and Heart & Sole (grades 6-8)! Registration will open at 7AM on Wednesday, February 17th and will fill up very quickly! Please be sure to register early. Girls will go on a waiting list once the allotted spots are filled.
Groups will be as follows:
GOTR:
Group A: Tu & Thu 3-4:30p Group B: Mon & Wed 5:30-7p Group C: Tu & Thu 5:30-7p
Heart & Sole: Tues & Thurs 5:30-7p
At GOTR, we strive to help each girl find her limitless potential by showing her how to feel healthy, joyful and confident! GOTR is so much more than a running program!
Our 10 week season starts the week of March 21st and meetings are twice a week for 90 minutes each. We culminate our season with our celebratory 5k event on Saturday, June 4, 2016 at the Fairgrounds in Essex!
Register here on 2/17 @ 7AM; http://www.girlsontherunvermont.org/girls-registration/
For more information about GOTR, please visit our website atwww.girlsontherunvermont.org, call or email Rachel at 802-503-7097Rachel@girlsontherunvermont.org, or like our Facebook page Girls on the Run Vermont!
*Come visit the WCS lobby from 2-3:30p on Tues, Feb 16 to learn more about the program!
Message from ⅚ Intern:
My name is Alexandria (Ally) Rice and I’m one of your new Student Teaching Interns! I originally hail from a small town near the Shenandoah Mountains in Northern Virginia. However, I decided upon entering college that Vermont would be a fabulous new adventure and, consequently, I am now a senior in the Middle Level Education Program with concentrations in History and English at the University of Vermont (Go Catamounts!)! This semester I will be working with students in Mr. Merrill’s fifth and sixth grade Humanities classes on a variety of lessons, activities, and projects. I am eager to get to know each and every student in order to best help support them in (and outside of) the classroom!
I feel so fortunate to work with Team Voyager and am so excited to work with you all this year! Thanks so much for welcoming me into your wonderful community!
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week we continued our study of The Giver. In preparation of our field trip to the Flynn next week, students participated in several pre performance lessons. Students created utopian societies, and analyzed the idea of control and censorship in society. We also added more words to our tier two lists and did some “popcorn” reading with several passages of the book.
We are looking forward to the performance on Wednesday.
We also continued our study of Lewis and Clark. Students marked the route of Lewis and Clark on large physical maps, noting the rivers, mountain ranges, and modern day states and and cities that they passed through. We brainstormed obstacles that they faced - terrain, climate, and animals/plants. Following the brainstorm, we watched segments of the documentary - Lewis and Clark: The Corps of Discovery, noting the actual obstacles and challenges they faced. Students will select an obstacle to journal about next week, after they read the actual journals of Lewis and Clark.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
5th Grade Math: We are moving toward closure on our big unit on standard algorithm for multiplication and division. Students have solid proficiency in a number of strategies for multiplying and dividing but some may not be at the standard algorithm. This is okay. They continue to make the needed relationships between ratio tables and area models in order to feel good about the transition to a less conceptual generalization in the “mom and dad’s” way of doing math. They will get there. Assessment on Tuesday and then onto Geometry!
6th Grade Math: As we finish Let’s Be Rational, know that proficiency is expected for operations with fractions. While most students are comfortable with algorithms that work for addition and subtraction, multiplication and division algorithms are relatively new. Most students have understanding of fraction of problems as multiplication and have some tried and true solution strategies. We have discovered some great division strategies but the idea of multiply by the reciprocal is very new. We worked all week relating strategies. We will continue to work those out next week as we review for the final Unit Assessment for Let’s Be Rational.
⅚ Science: This week Sean Parker, a local meteorological broadcaster, visited our classroom and gave us a firsthand look at just how difficult weather forecasting is. The students asked great questions and seemed very curious about the data used to predict the weather. See photos below.
On Monday, we will begin creating weather instruments to measure changes in wind direction, wind speed, temperature, and air pressure. We need one liter bottles! Thanks for saving and bringing them in!
Our final project for the weather unit is to write two LEAF paragraphs. I will assign these on Friday and they are due before break. See Google Classroom for the assignment.
Our upcoming unit is Cells and Human Body. During this unit we solve engineering problems related to the human body, like building prosthetics, but also we do a dissection. My friend, Bob Lobel, who is a cardiologist at UVM med, has come in to help with the heart dissections in the past. If you are interested in joining the dissection block, please let me know. It is an elective opportunity for students.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
During our morning classes we focused on identifying themes in “The Giver”. We started off by having students brainstorm themes that they thought were present in the story. Common themes that students came up with were: justice, change, love, truth, and courage. After discussing why these were common themes in the story for us, we independently read a packet about the underlying themes and layers in “The Giver” according to the author of the book Lois Lowry. Students read the packet first on their own, while highlighting and interacting with the text leaving notes about what statements stood out or seemed important to them. After having read the packet and interview, students ranked the 7 themes written about in the packet. According to our students the most important themes or underlying messages in “The Giver” are: choice, sameness versus diversity, and family. We then did a close reading of the section of the packet about the theme of “choice”. We then discussed why choice was such an important theme in the book and how it made an impact on the society and way of life for characters in the book. We also discussed what choices we have in our everyday life and why having choices are so important to our society and our freedoms. We then went into a simulation much like the Ceremony of Twelves in “The Giver” and students were assigned their careers for life, without any choice! Jobs were similar to those in “The Giver” and ranged from Fish Hatchery Assistant to Cart-Puller to Mold Scraper to Pipeworks Laborer to Director of Recreation and of course, The Receiver of Memories. Students, as you can imagine, had a wide range of responses to this activity depending on what job they were given. Students reflected on how they felt about their jobs, whether or not they matched their strengths, and why it is so important for people to be able to choose their own paths in life.
Our afternoon classes have been dedicated to time for students to work on their 1960’s graphic novels. The storylines I’ve heard so far have sounded great! Students are really pulling in their gained knowledge of the 60’s and applying it in creative ways. We have stories highlighting the Vietnam War, the draft, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”, JFK, and the Civil Rights Movement. We are taking this project step by step by having students complete a series of graphic organizers prior to starting to build their graphic novels in Pixton. Students had to complete an idea map, a completed plot triangle, character t-charts for each main character, and detailed storyboards. On Friday Pixton was introduced and students were able to create accounts in our online Pixton classroom. We are very excited to get started in Pixton, and I can’t wait to see these Graphic Novels come to life!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
Students have been working on unit rates, ratios and proportions with many different situations, like pizza and juice mixes, mapping skills and pasta prices. Being able to manipulate part-to-part, part-to-whole and whole-to-whole is an important part of this investigation. We have also explored how linear equations have a “constant of proportionality” and how it relates to the graph, table and equation.
CMP8
This week began with the 8th graders taking the “Frogs, Fleas and Painted Cube” Assessment. Kudos to the class for a 95% average! We haved moved from quadratic equations to function notation. Which is a math language with its own symbols such as f(x)= 2x + 2. We learned about inputs and outputs, domain and ranges.
Science 7th/8th
This week students have been researching the physical and chemical properties of elements from the Periodic Table. They created Superhero and Villain characters based on the characteristics of the element that they selected. We shared them in class on Friday, and we will be placing our Periodic Table up on a wall in Voyager House for all to see. Students created beautiful work!
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