TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
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Hold on to your Garage Sale goods!!! Voyager’s Recycle Sale is coming up Sat, March 26th and we need items donated to sell!
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A NOTE ABOUT BEHAVIOR→
We have been hearing about and witnessing an increase in undesirable behaviors both on house and off house and wanted to write to families so that you can perhaps touch base with your child about expectations at school. Some students have been not following the rules including: being in undesignated areas, rough-housing and participating in aggressive behaviors, and throwing snow and ice.
Cell phones are also becoming a big distraction in school. Students should not be using cell phones unless they have permission from the teacher. Cell phones should be put away and out of sight during the school day. If your student has a cell phone, please discuss this expectation and responsibility with him/her.
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Hello Voyager Parents,
Below you will find the highlights from the January FAP meeting. We have some great events coming up this spring. The Big Basket Raffle is such a fun event and the school's biggest fundraiser of the year and the 4th Annual Williston Runs 5K relay is such a great way for the school and town communities to come together. Below you'll find the dates of these great events.
Annual Big Basket Raffle and Silent Auction- Saturday, April 2, 2016
Williston Runs- May 14, 2016 http://willistonruns.org/
Thanks - Amy
FAPAC January 2015 Meeting Highlights Information
The FAP Advisory Council held its monthly meeting on January 14th. 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. Below are a few meeting highlights:
Administration Report: Greg Marino, District Principal, spoke about the budget impacts of Act 46 on the Williston school district. The administration is currently finalizing a revised plan of budget cuts, as requested by the School Board, to meet or come close to meeting the Allowable Growth Percentage set forth through the state law. There is one final Williston School Board budget working sessions open to the public to hear more on this topic. It is Jan. 15th at 7:30 am in the WCS Dining Room.
The CSSU Act 46 Study Committee is working on a report of the study efforts relative to the consolidation portion of the law, has a website for all the materials and information regarding this (http://act46.cssu.org), and an e-mail address of act46@cssu.org.
Upcoming Online Safety Presentation
Jan. 28th from 6:00-8:00 pm at WCS there is a presentation on the topic of online safety. This presentation is meant for parents as there is an in-school portion during the day.
School Board Position Openings: There are two school board positions opening up for vote in March. Please consider running for these positions and contact Kevin Mara for more information! kmara@cssu.org
Our next meeting is on Thursday, February 11th at 8:15 am at Williston Central School. We hope you can attend!!!
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week we started a new book - The Giver. Students participated in anticipatory activities that were really fun and helped them make deep connections to the book. Ask your student about the Ceremony of the 12’s activity. Copies of the book should be going home next week.
We also worked really hard on our personal narratives. We focused on elaboration, ending stories, and when to start new paragraphs. Students ended the week revising, editing, and sharing their narratives.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: It’s been a busy week! We have spending each day working on problem strings, a series of mathematically related problems that dig at our math sense and push us to search for relationships between numbers. Here’s an example: ¼ of 80, ¾ of 80, .25 x 80, and 25 x 81. The strategies used by students have been amazing. Seeing that ¼ and ¾ are related and that ¼ and .25 are related and that 25 is 100 times greater than .25 and that you can then use that to find 25 x 81 allows students to build solid conceptual justification for solving problems. Erin Kiely, our intern, taught her first solo class this week, and I was able to see, from my perspective of watching (without have to manage the instruction) just how wonderful the culture of learning is in this group of students. All of this work, multiplying different representations of number (multiplying fractions, decimals, and whole numbers) is in preparation for the rigor of fraction and decimal multiplication and in this unit, for mastering an algorithm for multiplying whole numbers (the fractions and decimal multiplication is coming!). We ended our week with a brief check up.
Math 6: We have moved our way from addition and subtraction of fractions to multiplication and today division. We have spent days working on the misconceptions of fractions, but still I see that they persist. Students have worked on recipes for addition and subtraction of fractions, but they are still adding numerators and denominators, most especially when the denominators are different. It will take some additional instructional to shake this persistent habit. The latter half of the week focused on multiplication of fractions and today, Friday, on division of fractions.
Science ⅚: It’s been a fun week of observing phenomena related to the nature of air. On Monday we poured hot water into a 2 liter plastic bottle and observed the effects. As the water cooled the bottle collapsed into itself. On Tuesday, we predicted what would happen when adding air to a volleyball. Some thought nothing would happen, others thought the ball would get heavier, while others still thought the ball would get lighter. There are so many misconceptions about air that the conversations were meant to drive understanding around this thing we call air, that we cannot see! Our conclusion after running the investigation was AIR HAS MASS. Long block this week then brought us to a demonstration with peppermint oil and helped us to see that odors travel in the air and that air must be moving, if we can smell the oil across the room, if everyone is sitting tight in their chair. It took less time for people closer to the oil to smell the odor and those further, longer. So yes, air moves. These short demonstrations are all leading to this idea of modeling in an exploratory way, a new NGSS standard. Student models attempt to explain what happened and why it happened. Students are learning a lot about air and about AIR PUPPIES. Ask them about those little puppies!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week has been loaded with in-class projects, station based learning, and journal writes leading us into our 20th Century History Unit.
During our morning classes students have been focused and working on their Eyewitness to History interviews. I’ve been able to hear about many of these interviews and have even read some small snippets. Students seem to have really received some great information and been able to listen to some interesting, intriguing, and surprising stories! This interview project is not only a great link to our 20th Century History studies, but it is serving as a performance task for our grammar unit. Students will be assessed on their ability to identify a variety of sentences, identify and use adverbs/adverbial phrases, and use consistent and proper verb tenses. A majority of our students are in a great place with this project, but there are some who still have not completed the initial interview and recording. This should be worked on over the weekend as the project is due on Tuesday. We wrapped up our week by getting back into our timeline project where students are working in small groups of their choice. Each group is creating a timeline of a decade from the 20th century. Once our individual decade timelines are complete we will put them all together to make one giant timeline of 20th Century U.S. History!
Our afternoon classes have been dedicated to 20th Century History starting with the 1960’s. This year the WCS Social Studies curriculum has us focusing on the 2nd half of 20th Century history, so we are starting with the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Students were introduced to the 1960’s through a fun, quick trivia game in class and then they began a 3 day, independent lesson on the 1960’s through station based learning. We set up 5 stations in the classroom and students rotated at their own pace to each one. The stations ranged from reading articles and answering questions (JFK, Vietnam, and the Freedom Fighters of the Civil Rights Movement) to watching Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “I Have A Dream” speech. We also had a station dedicated to music from the 1960’s where students had to listen to songs and read along with lyrics to get an understanding as to how music from the time period made an impact on the culture and people of the time period. Each station had a writing component as well. Students have been really enjoying this way of learning as it is independent and at their own pace. We look forward to discussing the topics they have been listening to and reading about next week!
A fun side note! We have a full-time intern from the University of Vermont joining us for the remainder of the school year. Rebecca Cory, or as the students call her Ms.B, is an undergraduate at UVM and is in her senior year. Her major is middle level education and her focus is Language Arts and Social Studies. We are excited to have her in the classroom and look forward to her unit on the Cold War in March!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
This week in math class we finished up our work on our “Blow it Up and Shrink it Down” projects. You will see them on display in my class over the next few weeks. There were a large number of students who did not finish on time, so you will see them coming home this weekend. It is our expectation that work comes in on time and with good quality. Students know that work will be assessed as late. I encourage late good quality work vs. no work or poor quality work.
We also began our work on our new book “Comparing and Scaling” where students need to move seamlessly from fractions, percentages, and decimals. We reviewed place value and played a fun game using cards and place value.
CMP8
This week we did investigations with triangular, rectangular figures. We worked with different forms of quadratic equations and practiced graphing them. Students are getting more proficient at creating equations from tables, and finding landmarks like line of symmetry, maximum/minimum point, y intercept and x intercepts. Students took a Partner Quiz this week and next week we will begin a mini-project using projectiles and catapults.
Science 7th/8th
This week we began our chemistry unit with a quick content check-up. Surprisingly students did not take the time needed to read with intent and so many did not do well. Students corrected their homework and then we reviewed the answers in class.
We participated in a mysterious substance lab where students had to describe the physical properties of an unknown solid in a closed film canister. We followed this investigation with a “top secret” density lab where students calculated density mass and displacement. We rounded off the week by looking at the physical property of matter called solubility. Students took a variety of solvents and dissolved different solutes in them and made observations.
