TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Last day of School- Friday, June 10th Half-Day (dismissal is 11:55am)
5th & 6th graders received Trout Release field trip forms this week. Please complete and return as soon as possible letting us know if you need a bagged lunch ordered for your student.
A note from Ms. Sherman about the 8th Grade Trip
In just a few short weeks we will be taking off to Montreal and Quebec City. Ms. Wesnak and I are so excited and looking forward to it, but…..there are still some outstanding balances that need to be paid in full. If you have an outstanding balance, could you please send in the remainder by Monday, May 9th. If this is not possible, please let me know at: csherman@cssu.org or send Katie Fieldsend an email at: kfieldsend@cssu.org. It should be a great trip and a nice way to come together before graduation.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We started our week off with a guest speaker. Jill from the DA Library came in to share the summer reading and other programs that will be available starting at the end of the school year. She had a number of books, magazines, games etc. to share with the students. The programs look to be a lot of fun. A bookmark with a list of the programs and activities was given to each student. Be sure to plan some good reading fun for your student over the summer.
Students worked on a couple of Westward Expansion projects over the week. In small groups, they selected a topic to read about and planned and created a large concept map based on the big ideas from their Truflix ebook. Students individually read the ebook about their topic and completed a graphic organizer to highlight key concepts and ideas for the map. They then met as a group to plan the map with the expectation that it would be full of words, phrases, facts, and pictures that captured the big ideas from each chapter of their book. After planning, students worked in pairs to make their contributions to the map.
They also learned about the Homestead Act and analyzed early ads promoting the opportunity to move west. Using the elements and concepts that they identified, students then created their own versions of an ad promoting the opportunities to move west.
We also completed two read alouds of true stories of kids and their experiences during Westward Expansion. One story focused on the Pony Express and the other on the railroads. Students participated in discussions and completed short assignments in their Reading Response Notebooks for each story.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: What an exciting week! Students worked on the concept of prime factorization and brainstormed and put into practice ways to use a prime factorization to do a whole bunch of things. For example when you prime factorize the number 20 into a product of primes (a prime factorization), you get the string 5 x 2 x 2. Students know when they have successfully prime factorized when the multiplication string has all prime numbers in it and equals 20. Students then discovered that you can find all the factors of the number 20 using those prime factors in the string. 5 and 2 are factors that you can see, but 2x2 is also a factor of 20. That’s 4! And 2x5 which equals 10. And then of course there are the factors 1 and 20. And voila! All the factors of 20. Students also discovered that the largest factor of a number is always half of the number itself and lower. Makes sense if you think that even numbers always have 2 as a factor. Odds then become an exception, but students recognized that the next largest factor will still always be half or less than half the number.
Math 6: Students dug in deep this week and worked out algorithms for multiplying and dividing decimals. This gave us the opportunity to work on whole number multiplication and division which was a needed skill. Students completed assessments Thursday and Friday (for those at the fitness challenge). We then worked on finding percents of a number. We are going to squeeze in several algebra lessons this week in the hope of getting them to some of the algebra standards addressed in SBAC. Please know that the big transition to algebra is an important one and the work students do in the next few weeks may not be reflected in SBAC scores. Students have good foundational knowledge of ratios and fact families which will help and this coming week’s work will help to hammer out use of variables and how to solve problems using them. This week also brings some practice problems on the SBAC test. I am committed to maintaining instructional periods for students. The practice on SBAC will be on how to get on, navigate the system and look at problems that might be representative of format.
Science ⅚: See photos below! Lots of work as we dig to the center of the Earth! Students main focus is to connect the spheres in the Grand Prismatic Pool in Yellowstone. We just dug deep into the earth to find out what is there. Lots of good modeling work and great work writing and recording ideas.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
We began our week with finishing up our Moving Straight Ahead Unit. We created class records and then took the unit test over a two day period. We are turning our attention to our new unit Filling and Wrapping, which delves into 3-D geometric figures, surface area and volume.
CMP8
We began the week with a review of It’s in the System. We created a class record and completed the test over two days. We are now going to shift our attention to reviewing for the CSSU Algebra Final. We plan to take each day to highlight and review the major concepts that we have covered. The final exam is on May 27th.
Science 7th/8th
We completed our geological time scale this week and took a pause to think about human time vs. geological time. Students wrote LEAF paragraphs from many perspectives to answer the question of why it is important to study geological time in relation to human time. We had a reading on earth’s structure and watched a really neat CG National Geographic movie on earth’s history. This video created an incredible model of all the changes that earth went through in the last 4.6 billion years. We rounded out the week with a review of rock cycle and a rock identification lab.
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