TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Dates to Remember:
- Thursday, Sept 22nd: Grades 5-8 Curriculum Night, Learning Expo & Parent Assembly
6:30pm - 7:00pm Parent Assembly in Auditorium
7:00pm - 8:00pm Curriculum presentations on house
8:00pm - 8:30pm Learning Expo in lobby & dining room
- Wednesday, Sept 28th: WCS Picture Day (Order forms were put in students cubbies!)
***8th Grade Families***
Saturday, October 15th from 8am - 11am at WCS will be the first 8th Grade Trip Fundraiser, a Pancake Breakfast & Touch-A-Truck Event
8th grader students and families are needed as volunteers for this fundraising event in order to keep trip cost low or none!! More info to follow- mark your calendar to volunteer and/or attend this event.
Permission Slip for walking field trip to Adam’s Apple Orchard and Farm Market is due back Monday, Sept 19th. Field trip form Here
A Note from Ms. Sherman:
INTEREST SPARK IS STARTING!!!!!
Interest Spark is a free after school program facilitated by teachers and staff. Every session is different with exciting new offerings. There is still time and room to sign up for this session of Spark! THIS SESSION…...two of your very own Voyager teachers are running their own Spark classes: Mr. Merrill is doing Outdoor fun and games with a focus on team-building and I’m doing Floral Work and Natural Art. The sessions meet on most Thursdays from 3:00-4:30. There is also a late bus which leaves at about 4:35. So, transportation is provided to those that need it. Come join us! It's a great way to learn something new and develop new relationships with peers from other houses and get to know new adults around the school. If you would like more information or the link to register, please contact Julie Rogers at: jrogers@cssu.org We
look forward to seeing you in one of our groups or enjoying another offering. Spread the
Word!!!!
Google Classroom:
We are using Google Classroom to post announcements, questions, assignments, work completion, and scores. The parent notification system in Google Classroom lacks the detail of our past system. In order for parents to see everything that their student is doing, including assignment expectations and scores, parents will need to use their students log in to access all the information available. Please spend some time each week with your child looking over their Google Classroom site.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We continued our read aloud of A Long Walk to Water. Students added character maps, a venn diagram comparing life in Sudan to life in the US, tier 2 words, and word maps to their reading response notebooks. The hardships that our main characters faced are astonishing. Ask your student about Nya and Salva and each of their stories.
We also started our preparation for the WCS Candidate Forum. Students will be learning about the candidates, offices, and issues of the 2016 election. We brainstormed about the upcoming election, researched the elected offices of Vermont, and read an article about the presidential candidates. We will be doing more research and starting a candidate poster project next week.
Scholastic Reading Club - If you would like to use the Scholastic Book Club Flyer to order books for your student (flyers are in student mailboxes), my Class Code is: M3MYC
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: This week began with our first investigation in the Bridges 5th Grade Program, called the Product Game. It was a great reminder of where students have been in 4th grade...the land of multiplication. The game, similar to Connect 4, challenges students to use their understanding of factors and products to get four chips in a row. Very good reminder of factors and products, and multiplication. Lots of competition in the room! We then moved right into work on rectangular prism, their dimensions, and the relationship to volume. This allowed us to continue working on multiplication, except this moved us from 2 factors to 3. The problem, Brad’s Baseball Shop, will be the context of our next few days of learning. Ask your 5th grader about the work they did to help Brad ship baseballs.
Math 6: Solidly in our first unit of Comparing Bits and Pieces, students are working on fundamental understanding of ratios. We began the week by looking at the context of our 5 days of learning: a fundraiser for groups of students in a school. The work we did this week went beyond just observing fractions of the goal met thus far, but on comparing one group’s fundraising goals and progress to another group’s goals and progress. When you compare progress within a group to comparing one group to another, you are thinking in fractions and ratios. This is hard work! Students thinking in ratios is moving toward proportional reasoning, a late 7th and 8th grade skill. Please know that if your child is expressing confusion, we are aware of it. Lots of exit tasks each week help us to assess and remediate in the moment.
⅚ Science: Our first days of science this week were filled with color, pattern, and design! Students choice a pattern in nature that they found beautiful interesting or puzzling, to sketch on canvas and paint. Some wondered why we were doing this to launch the year and our unit in Ecology. Students learned to look closely at something they saw, a phenomenon, and try to capture the characteristics of that pattern (as a close observer), so that they could wonder, question, claim about why things are the way they are. Some patterns, like ripples in sand, may be caused by the forces of wind or water. The pattern has no purpose; it is a result of a force. Whereas, the patterns on a zebra truly allow for survival of individuals and a group, a very purposeful adaptation of nature. So...looking closely at something helps to bring meaning.
We then sat for five minutes, eyes closed or opened, and listened, looked, breathed. Corny right? Well after a 2-3 minute reflection, you would have been moved to tears. What taking a moment of time does for us in life, right? This then led us to our anchoring phenomenon, two side by side photos of the same place over a 37 year period. What happened and why has that happened? We wrote questions about the changes, what we would need to know more about, etc. in order to drive some purpose to finding out about the 37 year photographic mystery. This will help us dive right into plants and their importance to the Earth.
Important Note: During the long block science period, next Thursday (Merrill) and Friday (O’Brien), your child will be doing a plant investigation along the nature trail just off the rec field pathway. We will be there for the entire 90 minute block, right up until the end of the day. If you want to join us, feel free. If you have to pick up early, please let Katie know by Tuesday. That way we can have someone available to walk them back. We will go rain or shine. Watch the weather for help with clothing choices. It will be a dirty day, so no fashion is all the fashion on this field day.
The Week in Mr. G’s Room:
This week in Humanities we began reading books voted on by each class. 7th grade chose The Great Wide Sea, and 8th grade chose And Then There Were None. We discussed Natural Rights and the responsibilities of individuals toward society. In the afternoon we focused on close reading preparatory material for a constitutional debate. We also began work on Personal Learning Plans and took a Briggs-Myer Personality test.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
We had some “aha” moments in class this week! It is moments like these that make you stop and celebrate. This week we began looking at linear and nonlinear functions using paper bridge experiments from our “Thinking with Mathematical Models” book. In the midst of all of these tests we looked at our scatterplots and created “best fit” lines. A best fit line is a line that captures the trend in data of a scatterplot. A single student had an epiphany that a linear equation could be derived by any two points on a line, a second one chimed in that it is just the ratio of any two points on the line and a third chimed in that finding the ratio of the rise/run finally made sense. It was like an alignment of planets and we celebrated it! We will continue to explore non-linear models next week.
CMP7
This week we began by exploring polygons and the common properties they have. We looked at regular polygons, triangles and quadrilaterals. We learned how to utilize protractors to find the sum of the internal angles of shapes. We also practiced constructing geometric figures.
Science 7th/8th
We began our unit this week with engineering a device that creates a sound like a bee.
This device, when quickly swung in a circle, creates the buzzing. Students needed to come to a consensus about changing one variable and hypothesize what would happen and why. Students placed holes in the paper, changed the dimensions of the paper, changed the rubber band, shortened the string and changed the type of paper used. Each experiment had its own outcome. Most importantly students learned about the engineering/experimental design process.
We also starting working on our motion and forces unit by investigating the question. What is a force and what forces are acting on us? We had the opportunity to utilize our new Vernier Dual Force Sensors to investigate the relationship between force and mass. We used carts, weights and ramps to carry out a series of experiments. We also took an online reading check-up to see how we understood our science reading. It was very informative to see what students had understood from the reading and I learned how to Google Forms.
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