TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
From Adam’s Apple Orchard:
Voyager students picked apples to donate to the Williston Food Shelf.
Dates to Remember:
- 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.
Voyager House Homework Club
Voyager House Homework Club started Thursday, September 22nd and continues every Tuesday from 2:00 - 3:30 and on Thursday from 3:00-4:30. Students will be able to take the activities bus home both days, which will leave at 4:30 on Thursdays and 3:30 on Tuesdays. Homework Club is available to any student who would benefit from supervision and support while completing homework after school. Stride Paraeducator, Jeff Merchia, will be in charge of the club.
Additional Support
Ms. O'Brien will be available by request for after school support on Mondays, 3-4pm.
Mr. Merrill will be available by request for after school support on Wednesdays, 3-4pm.
Please let us know ahead of time if your student will be staying after school for additional support.
Thank you!
Intergen Reading Program / A Monthly Book Group
What is it? FAP teams up with the Dorothy Alling Memorial Library to sponsor a fun book group that brings together WCS middle school students, seniors from our community and parent volunteers. Each book group will read and discuss 5 books over the course of the school year.
When? The program will kick-off in October with a “Get Acquainted” luncheon. The book groups will then meet during school hours once a month to discuss books in a relaxed and fun setting.
If your 5th-8th grade child is interested in being considered for this program, please register using this online link: https://goo.gl/forms/Zh0yJatqFE874oXH2
Google Classroom - Do I need a Gmail address to be invited?
No! You can use your current email address to receive an invitation. You will need to create a Google Account to accept the invitation, but you can do so with your existing email address. Learn more about invitations for Classroom guardian email summaries.
Do I need a Google Account to receive email summaries?
For security reasons, you need a Google Account to receive email summaries from Classroom. You don’t need Gmail to create the account—you can create a Google Account with your current email address. A Google Account allows you to set the frequency of your emails, update your locale, and view all students connected to your account. Learn more about invitations for Classroom guardian email summaries.
So, those parents with Comcast, Yahoo, MSN, or other email addresses beside gmail.com will need to follow the steps above. It's a security measure.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We finished the book, A Long Walk to Water this week. Ask your student about how the two stories and main characters, Nya and Salva, came together at the end. Before and after our read aloud time, students added new information and thoughts to their character maps and diagrams.
We also added more vocabulary to our Tier 2 word lists. Many students have already filled up the Read Aloud section of their Reading Response Notebook. To wrap up the week, we watched the documentary, Just Add Water (https://vimeo.com/19003538) and student started to brainstorm ideas on how to help Salva’s non profit organization - Water for Sudan.
We also introduced our Election 2016 vocabulary list. Students made word maps and we performed our new vocabulary by playing “Overheard Conversations”. In this activity, students work in small groups to perform a word, without saying the word. The audience then tries to guess which word they are performing. Finally, we looked at all of the candidates this year, and students selected a candidate to make a campaign poster of to put on display for our upcoming candidate forum.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Highlights this week:
- Learned about what makes a rectangular prism.
- Discussed strategies for finding the volume of a rectangular prism.
- Discussed surface area.
- Generated claims about volume and surface area of rectangular prisms.
- Used ipads to “peel off” our surface area for our prisms and make visual models
- Did lots of talking with each other!
- Took a numerical expressions check up, to see where we are at with mental math following our work on problem strings (a series of related problems that lead to a distinct in your head strategy for multiplication eg. doubling one number and halving the other keep the product the same).
- Revisited properties of numbers by playing the Multiple Game.
Math 6: Highlights this week:
- Solidified the meaning of the word ratio and revisited the relationship between ratios and comparative statements
- Talked a lot about the differences between fractional thinking and ratio thinking
- Lots of talk in the classroom, turn and talk, turn and talk and on and on
- Began discussions on unit rate, a ratio in which one of the numbers is a 1.
- Talked about that fact that every ratio has two unit rates.
Science ⅚: In case you haven’t heard...we began our ecology work this year by viewing two satellite images of a place in the Amazon rainforest, one from 1975 and the other from 2012. The purpose of this launch, was to encourage the scientific process of wondering, what happened to this place and why has this happened? Because the most shocking part of the images had to do with the color green (plants), we began a learning sequence on plants. Why are they so important? As part of this, I introduced four new science terms this week, all in the context of learning activities that kids could relate to. We talked about what ecologists are and why they do what they do, allowing opportunities for a discussion about biotic and abiotic factors in an ecosystem. We are using the outdoor classroom every day to dig at these concepts. As we moved through the week, I introduced the term, biodiversity, as a way to begin discussions about why do ecologists want to know how biodiverse a place is? What does it tell us about that place? We ended our week outside, engaging in a field study on the river trail of the Allen Brook (along the bike path). Students were assigned a plot in which they were mapping the organisms living in the plot. Without the need to name things, student used symbols to represent all the different organisms present in the plot. We had two woodland plots, a grassy field plot, two riverine plots, and one outer margin plot between the river and the rec fields. A good practice for our little ecologists. See photos below.
The Week in Mr. G’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
We began the week looking at scatter plots with the focus of trying to find a model that would fit the data. We have been fine tuning our idea of how to construct a line of best fit that is more true to the trend. We learned how to calculate residuals which is the error calculated from the actual data and your model. It is interesting, detailed work that is stretching their understanding of linear equations.
CMP7
We made some great strides this week with our question of how you can find the internal sum of any sided regular polygon. Two equations were floated by several students (n * 180) - 360 or (n-2) * 180. (n= number of sides of a polygon) We did some moving in class with rotational angles 180’s, 360’s, 540’s and we learned how to use benchmark angles (45, 90, 180) to help us estimate angle rotation. We continued to practice using protractors to construct and measure angles and to label them correctly.
Science 7th/8th
We continued our cart and ramp experiment with mass, force and speed. Students showed grit as they had to redo tests that were skewed or improperly done. It was certainly a learning curve utilizing our new Vernier force probes. This Force and Motion Lab will be the first graded assignment for the term. The Next Generation Science Standard that this lab addressed was to construct and interpret graphical data to describe relationships of kinetic energy to mass and speed of an object. The learning targets that this lab will address are:
- When given a testable question, I can plan an investigation, including necessary controls, constants and clear procedures, which yield sufficient evidence to define the relationship between one set of variables.
- When given data with multiple variables, I can write a summary that describes one relationship and uses evidence to support that relationship.
- When given a set of data with multiple independent or dependent variables I can create a clear and accurate graph that best represents the data.
The final product will be collected next week.
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