TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Dates to Remember:
November 21 - 25: No School Happy Thanksgiving!
Wednesday, Dec. 7th: Voyager Family Night in Voyager Kiva & WCS Auditorium
Sunday, Dec. 11th: 11:30am - 4:00pm Polar Express Elves
Thank you for all of the Thanksgiving Basket donations!!! Voyager was able to offer four bountiful baskets to families in need in our community!
FAPAC November 2016 Meeting Highlights Information
The FAP Advisory Council held its monthly meeting on November 10th. FAP is Williston's equivalent of a parent-teacher organization. We meet each month, our meetings our open to all, and you will receive an email like this every month with highlights of the meeting and a link to the FAP website for the full minutes. Check the full minutes in a PDF format by clicking here.
You can now follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@FAP_Williston)!
Below are the meeting highlights:
FAPAC Meeting Recording
The November FAPAC meeting was recorded and is available at this link online.
Craft Show Thanks
Many thanks to everyone who came out and supported the Craft Show by volunteering their time and/or shopping! A special shout-out to our Full House volunteers: Meghan Cope and the Rieley and Ruggles families for helping with set-up, circulating during the craft show, and the all important tear-down!
Financial Report
Taxes have been completed. We are still collecting donations to the Annual Fund. A reminder that the Annual Fund directly funds house accounts for field trips, guest speakers and other activities your child participates in. EVERY student, in EVERY grade receives a direct benefit from the Annual Fund! However, Full House participation in the Annual Fund is at only 23%. Please donate to the annual fund if you haven't already. Remember that all donations to the Annual Fund are tax-deductible. Suggested donation amounts are $45 per student in grades 5-8, but any amount is welcome. The link to donate to the Annual Fund can be found here.
Administration Update
We had about a 65% percent turnout for Election Day this year. Thank you to the town and staff and students for being flexible and vigilant. We will continue to collect information on how to make this day smoother. Thank you so much voting in support of the bond.
Decision packets were reviewed and voted on by FAP members. Many other constituency groups will also vote. This process is unique to Williston and anyone can submit a packet to be considered.
Upcoming Events
Scholastic Book Fair: November 28th – December – 2nd in the Williston Central Dining Room
FAP Meeting: December 8, 8:15 AM in the WCS Dining Room
Big Basket Raffle: March 25th
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
In Current Events Voyager 5th and 6th graders have begun work on a Countries of the World project. For this project students have selected a country from around the globe that they will be researching over the course of the year. Students will learn about their respective countries and share that information with their classmates. Students will also work on creating a collaborative Google Map that they will be able to post country related current events to over the school year. The goal is to create a collaborative resource that students can use increase their knowledge of the wider world that we live in.
We wrapped up our Mystery reading this week and students wrote a LEAF essay on their book. As the 1st trimester comes to a close, students completed rubrics on their reading response notebooks, writer’s notebooks, and independent reading habits. We also kicked off our Harry Potter unit a little early with a special Sorcerer’s Stone read-a-thon Friday morning.
A special thanks for all of the donations to help us prepare a Thanksgiving basket for the food shelf.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5
Students have just begun a new unit which helps them understand decimals. The link between fractions and decimals is made clearer, through a deep introduction to the Base Ten place value system and the link for each place value with a fraction out of 10, 100, 1000. At this point all 5th graders have cleared their folders and are starting from scratch with a new Home Connection packet and new handouts coming. Otherwise, all assessments and work was sent home to be signed and returned to school. Please return all of the guts of the folder too, and I will sort through and pull assessments for their files, so that you can then take another look at the end of the trimester, as you look at Jump Rope.
Math 6
6th Graders have fully explored the ideas contained in the 2nd Investigation of Let’s Be Rational, how to multiply fractions. It has been interesting, exploring ideas beyond just multiplying the numerators and the denominators. Students were asked questions like, does taking a fraction of a number always result in a value smaller than what you started with? How about if the fraction is larger than 1? We also looked at the generalizability of models for fraction of a fraction. How can we relate what we know about finding the area of a rectangle to a fraction of a fraction problem? I took a snapshot of our public record. You can see that in some models the two numbers being multiplied are the dimensions of the rectangle and in others they are not. This was our push toward looking deeply at the patterns that come up in our modeling experiences.
Science ⅚
The classroom is busy! And messy! Students worked this week to finalize a prototype for the Engineering Challenge Thursday and there were some great solutions to the 4 problems presented by teachers. Students participated in a school wide ⅚ presentation of solutions and many were very successful. See photos below.
The Week in Mr. G's Class:
In Humanities we have spent the week preparing to write our novels over break. Students have set word count goals and schedules for themselves to meet their goals. As a class, we are at 57% of our Total word count goal of 477,451. We have collectively written nearly 300,000 words, or about five mid length novels.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
In Humanities we have spent the week preparing to write our novels over break. Students have set word count goals and schedules for themselves to meet their goals. As a class, we are at 57% of our Total word count goal of 477,451. We have collectively written nearly 300,000 words, or about five mid length novels.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
The growth rate of mold, the garter snake population in an ecosystem and the overpopulation of rabbits in Australia were examples of exponential growth models. Students have been moving from equations to tables to graphs and vice versa. We are gaining an understanding of the y-intercept and its placement in our exponential equation. We explored growth factors and found that we could look at the pattern in the “y” by taking one value and dividing it by the previous value. 450/300 = 1.5. That is the growth factor for this exponential model.
x
|
y
|
1
|
300
|
2
|
450
|
3
|
675
|
4
|
1,012.50
|
Students completed GGG Check-up #1. You can ask your son/daughter to see the learning target rubric.
CMP7
This week we took a segue from positive and negative integers to explore algebraic equations.
We tried our hand with 1 and 2 step equations.
Here is an example of a one step and two step equations.
We also worked on graphing inequalities from equations and finding equations from inequality graphs.
We ended the week with reviewing adding and subtracting integers through Bingo and the card game “25”.
Science 7th/8th
This week was all about the school wide engineering challenge.Students designed, tested and redesigned solutions to four different tasks: Rubberband car, Marshmallow catapult, Zipline and Ramp ball.
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Students took lots of data to get prepared for the school wide competition. Students will pass in their journals and do a final reflection to complete this task.
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