TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Ms. O’Brien needs newspapers! If you could please save any newspapers and send them in, that would be great!
Thank you to all who helped with the Recycle Sale this year!!
Voyager raised $1,657.20! Great job!!
8th Grade News!!
- 8th graders received CVU Summer Camp brochures this week. You can find more information about the camps at: CVU Summer Camp
- Final payments for 8th grade trip are now due! Please get payments turned in to Voyager TA as soon as possible.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We started our week with Reading Cafe. Students should have a really good independent reading book that they will finish reading by Wednesday, 4/13. Students will participate in a book talk on Friday, 4/15. They will lead a discussion on the book using an organizer that is due on Thursday, 4/14.
We also started two different writing projects. In a few weeks, the Williston Observer will be taken over by kids! Students selected from a long list of prompts to write or draw and submit to the Williston Observer by Tuesday, April 5. After writing a first draft in the Writer’s Notebook, students are typing it into a google doc that is posted on Google Classroom. Students will receive verbal and/or written feedback to use to revise and edit the piece before it is due. The submission will be reviewed and selected by The Observer.
Our Argument Writing unit is also underway. We will be using a number of picture books to learn some important skills and strategies of this writing genre. This week we read, “Duck! Rabbit!”. Students used the pictures and information to take a position. Ask your student - Was it a duck or a rabbit? We also read “Hey, Little Ant” to learn about the importance of perspective in argument writing. Next week we will be learning more skills and strategies, as well as drafting an argument piece on a school related topic for an upcoming debate in two weeks.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Erin Kiely, my math and science intern, begins next week! She will be taking over my class every day. Erin is launching Prime Time (6th Grade CMP book) with Grade 5; she is launching Decimal Ops with Grade 6; and finally she will be doing Climate Change 101 for the ⅚ Science classes. Please feel free to contact her during this time (ekiely@cssu.org). I will also be at work!
Math 5: Students spent the week finalizing concepts in the geometry unit on volume and surface area. We developed several hands on activities to supplement learning for concepts of surface area particularly. Students were given an odd shaped object and need to use cardstock to create a box that would be perfectly snug for the object. The process of building was fascinating. Students were on the clock, a competition of sorts, and the ways students went about this was fascinating. Some of the final boxes successfully enclosed the objects and some did not. We arrived at the generalization of surface area in a simpler way by measuring length width and height of the object and then noticing that we could use those measures to strategically cut each face. Assessment today!
Math 6: Students have been further developing ideas related to volume and surface area. We spent some time on this in 5th grade, and I am always interested in seeing how this concept sticks or doesn’t in 6th grade. The introduction of nets related to surface area has been the most challenging. Imagining a rectangular prism flat on the table is difficult. We have arrived at some generalizations for nets related to surface area. The focus for the next few days will be on mixed number dimensions measures, in order to reintegrate fraction work into geometric design of rectangular prisms. Many students need another hit on fractions so this provides another chance to get back to that. Assessment for geometry is Wednesday. Learning maps will be designed for study review. Decimals begin next week.
Science ⅚: Our week was spent organizing for our presentation which you all attended on Thursday evening. There were a variety of topics presented and many successful presentations. We will all be reflecting on the experience in science today working on critical evaluation of each of our roles in how well we presented what we understand about the human body. Please feel free to pass along photos, as I was not in all the presentations. Thank you for coming. Each student was very brave standing up there! It’s a hard skill to learn.
The week in the 7/8 community:
This week all 7th and 8th graders completed their SBAC tests! We saw some amazing examples of grit and perseverance. We also saw students applying skills such as creating graphic organizers and plot triangles for their writing, and using graph paper to help calculate equations and plot points on linear graphs for math. We also saw students creating data tables and utilizing all of the tools provided on the SBAC test such as highlighting, strikethrough, the notepad, and spellcheck. We are extremely proud of our 7th and 8th graders for putting in huge amounts of effort, thought, and practice into their testing. We ended the week with regular classes in the morning, and then finished the day by watching Apollo 13. As we bring our 20th century history unit to a close with the Space Race and Cold War, we thought this would be a great way to end the unit and our testing week.
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