TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
8th Graders:
- Final payments for 8th grade trip are now due! Please get payments turned in to Voyager TA as soon as possible.
Did you donate a suitcase to our Recycle Sale? These items below were returned from the new suitcase owner… they were found inside the suitcase. If these belong to you please let me know!
A special thanks to Abby Lord for burning all of the Humanimals DVD’s that were sold!
5th & 6th Graders:
Upcoming Field Trips-
Friday, May 13th- Trout release at Lewis Creek in Starksboro. Students will release trout that have been raised in the classroom into the open creek, picnic lunch at site afterwards. Permission slips to be sent home at later date.
Thursday, June 2nd- June 3rd- Camping overnight at Button Bay State Park in Ferrisburgh. Parents are welcome to join this overnight experience. Thursday, June 2nd students will leave WCS and head to Rokeby Museum for the day and picnic lunch, then bus will transport all to Button Bay where campsites will be waiting along with a group dinner. Breakfast in the morning before loading bus and heading to Snake Mountain for a hike and picnic lunch with view. Students will return to WCS by the end of the day Friday, June 3rd. More info to come soon with sign up sheet for chaperones, camping supplies and food.
Voyager is hosting May’s school dance!!
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. We need help with set-up, drinks/treat donations and chaperones.
Sign up to help with this fundraiser or email Katie Fieldsend at KFieldsend@cssu.org with how you can help out. Dance Sign Up
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
During Reading Cafe, students were introduced to the booktalk organizer that they should fill out and use to prepare for their booktalks next Friday. A link to the booktalk organizer is provided on Jupiter Grades. Students should plan on using the independent reading book that they have committed to reading for this assignment.
We kicked off our debate unit this week. Students are on teams and will research, organize, and prepare to perform in a formal debate next week. Ask your student what issue he or she will be debating next week. You can see the debate format and some of the organizers students are using on Google Classroom.
Argument writing will piggyback on the debate unit. Students will use the same topic that they are arguing in the debate for an argument piece. We reviewed and practiced a number of argument writing strategies and techniques this week. Students completed an outline for their piece this week and will write a final draft next week.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Note from Ms. Kiely:
5th Grade Math: On Thursday, students moved from the Bridges math curriculum into Connected Mathematics. Students will use this program for the remainder of this year as well as next year in sixth grade. On Thursday, we reviewed how to find factors and multiples of a number. On Friday, students were introduced to the terms least common multiple and greatest common factor and they applied these concepts to a real-world problem involving Ferris wheels.
6th Grade Math: On Thursday, students began a new unit on decimal operations. So far, we have discussed how to decide which operation to use when given a word problem, how estimation can help us determine if our answer is reasonable, and how to use unit rates to solve problems.
Science: This week students began a new unit on global climate change. We launched the unit by modeling the greenhouse effect using mason jars, thermometers, and heat lamps. Students watched a variety of videos about causes and effects of global warming, and they identified from those videos a topic that they want to explore in greater detail next week. Students chose to focus on deforestation, weather, polar bears, coral reefs, human health or rising sea level. This unit is going to go by fast because it will be wrapping up before break, but my hope is that in the next week students will gain a deeper understanding of what is causing global warming, what problems are resulting from it, and what steps can be taken to combat global climate change.
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week during AM Humanities students took the time to set a reading goal. The hope is to achieve this reading goal by the end of the year. The goals have been displayed in our classroom so students can look at them daily to be reminded of their goal. At the end of the year students will self-assess to see how they did in meeting or achieving their goal. For the remainder of the week students were engaged in reading articles in relation to our upcoming argument writing piece. Students will be arguing about where the funding should come from for our National Parks. We have already engaged in great discussions, and students have been actively reading by highlighting facts or evidence that could connect to both sides of the argument. Next week we will begin our writing!
In the afternoon classes students wrapped up their work with 20th Century History by completing their Cold War projects. We saw some great presentations on Friday afternoon that were not only fun, but very engaging with fantastic learning activities!
This week we also took time on Thursday afternoon to view this year’s musical “Shrek”! We are all so proud of our Voyager participants in the cast and crew!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
Students have been working hard on exploring linear equations, graphs and tables. Creating stories or situations for linear equations and finding real world meaning for y = mx + b were just a few of the tasks we worked on. We practiced solving one step equations, balancing equations, and we explored an online math symbol game called “Solve me”. We also listened to a fun “cheesy video” by Colin Dodds on Slope . We finished the week with a Partner Quiz based on the first two investigations.
CMP8
We started the week with a Sweet Systems of Equation investigation. Students had to solve the mystery of how many jelly beans and M & M’s were in a bag of 60 candies. We found the average mass of each type of candy and then found the mass of the mystery bag. We created a system of equations where m + j = 60 candies and .80m + 2.4 j = mass of the bag. Finding the common solution to both equations helped us to find the number of M & M’s and jelly beans in our mystery bags. It was a “sweet” problem. We continued solving systems of equations using a solving strategy called substitution and combination. We practiced a lot of multi-step processes this week. Kudos to my 8th graders and their perseverance!
Science 7th/8th
After a week of SBAC hiatus, we worked to complete our hot/cold pack engineering task. On Monday, students did a final test using their models on our GoTemp temperature probes. On Tuesday we had our competition and it was a close race in both classes. Students completed their lab reports that focused on stating the problem, creating a model to solve the problem, testing the model, analyzing the test results, researching chemical reactions and discussion what worked and didn’t. This is the first major grade for this term.
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