TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Dates to Remember:
Saturday, October 15th, 8am - 11am Williston School Fall Fest
Thursday, October 20th - ⅞ Parent Conferences Thu 7/8 Conference
Friday, October 21st - ⅚ and ⅞ Parent Conferences (No School)
Monday, October 24th - ⅚ Parent Conferences Mon 5/6 Conference
Wednesday, October 26th- 9:30 - 10:30 Picture Retake Day! (Original photos to be out before 10/26)
Friday, October 28th - ⅚ Field Trip to State House, Supreme Court and VT Historical Museum
Friday, Nov. 4th - Voyager’s Book & Media Sale Set-up
Saturday, Nov. 5th - Voyager’s Book & Media Sale
Wednesday, Dec. 7th- Voyager Family Night in WCS Auditorium
Sunday, Dec. 11th - 11:30am - 4:00pm Polar Express Elves
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
Students wrapped up their LEAF essays this week. They received some feedback on their drafts and then typed, revised, and edited a final draft.
Students should be prepared to present a book talk on Monday about a book recently completed. We will be starting a mystery/thriller literature group next week.
WCS Candidate Forum
Eight candidates for various Vermont offices came to WCS last Friday morning to field questions from our students. The candidates include Senator Leahy, Congressman Peter Welch, Deb Bucknan (running for Attorney General), David Zuckerman (running for Lieutenant Governor), Scott Milne (running for US Senate), State Treasurer Beth Pearce, Randy Brock (running for Lieutenant Governor), and Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan.
Seventh and eighth graders prepared questions and each team selected two students to address the candidates. Charlotte DeSantos and Mia Kenney represented Voyager House and did a great job!.
Fifth and sixth graders created hand-drawn posters for the candidates which lined the hallways, the auditorium and the front of the stage. Candidates signed many of these posters which students may now bring home. Ada Jones and Gabby Clark did the camera work for RETN. You can see the full forum here on the RETN website.
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The panel responding to student questions
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The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: This week we focused on finding fractions of whole numbers. We are doing modeling all the time, so students used square tiles and are moving to the double number line model in order to make connections and generalizations.
Math 6: Lots of fractions, decimals and percent work! We are working hard to understand how fractions can be renamed as decimals and ultimately percents. This foundational work is very necessary and so the focus on this will be ongoing. Also, we are still trying to get the hang of the traditional model for division. Feel free to practice at home!
Science ⅚:
Our week was filled with interesting events from a Google Hangout session with Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer from Sea Education Association to tag games to learn about eating relationships. Specifically students learned about the death of an albatross as it relates to ocean plastics and how Sea Education Association is compiling data sets to understand the state of plastics in our ocean and how they affect organisms in the ocean food chain. The kids did a great job and asked great questions to Kara. It was fun to meet a real scientist. In addition, we learned about producers, consumers, and decomposers and then modeled those eating relationships in a tag game. More to come on this topic...
The Week in Mr. G’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in Humanities we started really digging into character creation in preparation for National Novel Writing Month this November. Students began creating their protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters. In the afternoon we prepared presentations to explain “Trends of Democratization.”
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
We are venturing into non-linear functions, specifically inverse variations. An inverse variation is a function that creates a curve. In this function x is increasing while y is decreasing at a decreasing rate. The equation for this function is xy = k(constant). A table for this function would look like this.
x
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1/4
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1/2
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1
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3/2
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2
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y
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4
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2
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1
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2/3
|
1/2
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The graph would look like this.
CMP7
This week we explored the relationship between the internal and external angles of polygons. We found that the external sum of angles of any polygon is 360.
We also found that when you divide a polygon into triangles, you must subtract the internal angles that are around the central point. We finished the week with exploring the side lengths of triangles.
Science 7th/8th
This week we continued our engineering task by investigating how to use the mousetrap to power our cars. Students are working to build and test their cars. Next week we will continue testing, refining our models and finally competing. Students will do a final write-up on the physics of their car with emphasis on the learning targets of creating and following an experiment plan, graphing data, analyzing data and finally, connecting all of their findings to energy transformation.
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