TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Voyager is hosting May’s school dance!!
Cinco de Mayo decorations are needed!!
Dance is Friday, May 6th. Money raised from this directly funds our Field Trip budget so please help out! Parent chaperones and treat donations truly help make this an exciting fundraiser for our team. Dance Sign Up
Last day of School- Friday, June 10th Half-Day (dismissal is 11:55am)
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
⅚ students spent our first day back as audience members for the 8th grade challenge presentations. The presentations had a wide variety of topics and community connections. Students provided feedback for each presenter and many noted the amount of time and effort that was required of this year long project.
American Progress is a well known painting that symbolizes Westward Expansion in a positive light. We analyzed the painting to kick off our new unit. Students will learn that in some ways expansion was not really what is expressed and symbolized in the painting. See the painting for yourself and talk about it with your student. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_progress.JPG)
After completing a Westward Expansion research packet (due Friday), students will work in groups and select a topic for a Westward Expansion project. Topics will include the Gold Rush, Transcontinental Railroad, Oregon Trail, and Life in the West.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Students are doing a great job sliding into the 6th grade books now used for the latter part of 5th grade. Prime Time, our current book, circles back to properties of numbers and how we can use these to solve problems. Students have looked at “at the same time” problems, like the Ferris Wheel, Cicada Emergence, and Clock problems all of which require understanding of Common Multiples to solve. They have also looked at “sharing equally” problems which most often involve Common Factors to solve. Bagging snacks and problems about bbq items like hotdogs and buns or party favors for friends all involve common factor strategies.
Math 6: Students are busting out some awesome calculation work this week. Not only have students finally begun to grasp the traditional algorithms for whole numbers (I’m having a private celebration about it!) they are also getting the hang of decimals. For students that struggle with fractions, this is further practice with these, but also another opportunity to address place value and the value of numerals in specific places in a number. We also entered division of decimals by talking about the mean/average. This was an intentional move to expose students to statistics before SBAC. Most of our decimal division work will be in this arena in order to practice this concept.
Science ⅚: Science has been exciting this week! We began our first few investigations on the Grand Prismatic Pool in Wyoming’s Yellowstone Park, and students are super interested in the mystery of this phenomenon. Wednesday we went on a virtual tour of Yellowstone using Google 3D glasses and it was fantastic!
Ongoing work: development of understanding the spheres of the Earth and how they are all interacting in the Grand Prismatic Pool.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in AM Humanities we spent our mornings reviewing our Literature Group Books and assignments, and working on our national parks argument writing piece. Students seem to be really enjoying our final books! The 7th graders are reading “Walk Two Moons” and the 8th graders are reading “Mountains Beyond Mountains”. Both books have excellent connections to our geography work, and “Walk Two Moons” also brings in our work with the national parks. Students have done a great job with reading activities such as building Venn diagrams, analyzing quotes, or reflecting on key moments in the reading. Our work with national parks was taken to a new level this week as we were able to take a virtual trip to 3 of our parks. We toured Mount Rushmore, Yosemite, and Yellowstone through the help of virtual reality and Google Cardboard! This was a really exciting adventure for our class as each student was able to take part in the experience. This was also great because this won’t be the only time students will be using virtual reality at school. A few weeks ago I proposed the idea to be a trial classroom on how to use virtual reality apps and experiences in the classroom by using some of the apps and experiences I learned about while at a teaching conference in Austin, Texas this past March. My proposal was approved by administration and the tech team, so we are now a VR classroom! We are equipped with 8 Google Cardboards (which are virtual reality headsets made out of cardboard, velcro, and lenses), and we will be using them for station based learning experiences with our global geography unit! We closed out this fantastic week with some in-class writing time on our argument papers.
During our afternoon classes we started to tackle learning and understanding the Western and Midwestern regions of the United States for a quiz on Friday. Students were given two class periods for study times, and some students even took the quiz early to get it out of the way. On Thursday students took part in a lesson around the 5 Themes of Geography and understanding physical characteristics of geography. Students analyzed photos of different places and were able to point out the 5 themes of geography within the photo. Students also took their skills to a map of the United States, where they were asked to answer 10 questions around physical characteristics of the United States and identifying various landforms and bodies of water.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
Stairs....we use them everyday. They are quite handy for going up and going down, but did you know how handy they are for figuring out the slope of a line? By measuring the tread and the riser you can calculate the pitch or slope of your stairs. Students took some measurements around school to find the slope or pitch of the stairs and to find out if they met the regulations needed for building code.
We are coming to the end of this unit. We are going to review how to create equations from tables and graphs, how to find the slope and equation from a set of coordinate points and how to find if coordinate points are solutions to equations. We will most likely have the unit test next week.
CMP8
This week the 8th graders explored how to graph inequalities and systems of inequalities. We also learned how to find solutions to these systems by treating them as equalities. Our unit is coming to an end, so we are reviewing our algebraic skills with solving systems using combination/elimination, and substitution. Next week will bring the unit test.
Science 7th/8th
“Where does a geologist like to relax?.....in a rocking chair.”
We have started our Geology unit with a variety of videos and vocabulary to get us thinking about rocks and the forces that shape earth. Students worked together in groups to create a timeline spanning 4.6 billion years. It is allowing us to see the scope of life on this planet and how truly old the earth is in relation to our presence.
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