Friday, February 19, 2016

Week of February 15th - 19th

TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***

February Winter Break:
No school Monday, Feb 22nd - Monday, Feb 29th.  School resumes Tuesday, March 1st.

Thank you to everyone who donated food for our Voyager House breakfast this morning.  The kids LOVED it and it really helped add to the exciting day at WCS today.
Have a fun & safe February Break!!

ALL Voyager Parents -- Save The Date!

The Voyager Recycle Sale is Saturday, March 26th!  This is our biggest, most fun event of the year!  A giant indoor yard sale!!!!  Please start to gather anything you'd like to unload...household items, old artwork/posters, furniture, rugs, sporting equipment, books, toys, gently used jeans, dresses, jackets (any clothes must be clean, properly folded and ready to 'sell') costume jewelry, tools, working electronics.  What a great activity for the upcoming February break!  Spring cleaning!

All items can be dropped off at WCS on Friday, March 25th between 6 and 8 pm.  The sale is
Saturday, March 26th, 9:00 am - 2:00 pm.  If you are new to Voyager (parents of 5th graders, or new students) please make an effort to join us, this is a wonderful, community- building event and everyone has a blast. We'll have a bake sale, on-site DJ playing music.  It draws a huge shopping crowd and has become a Williston tradition.  It is a great way to clean out and recycle your unwanted items and find new treasures!!!

We will have a sign-up wiki set up during February. Please save the date and volunteer for a shift.  Shifts are only 2-hours, so a great opportunity to help out!  We'll also be sharing a poster soon that you can post/print and share with your friends.  More to come!!! If you have any questions please feel free to contact me atapechaver@yahoo.com

Big Basket Raffle
Collections for the 16th Annual Big Basket Raffle and Silent Auction are underway!  This is one of FAP’s biggest fundraisers of the year, with proceeds funding FAP programs that support all WCS and ABS students, families and staff.  Items donated by our Williston School District families will be made into beautiful themed baskets that will be raffled off at the BIG BASKET RAFFLE on Saturday, April 2nd, 2016.
Merrill: Spice it Up!- Donation suggestions: Hot sauce, Spice rubs Gourmet salts, Salsa, BBQ sauce, Chutney, Cookbooks about spicy foods, dried hot peppers, and gift cards to Mexicali or any other restaurant with a spicy theme. Gift cards to specialty markets.
O’Brien: Sock it to Me!- Donation suggestions: Socks for all ages and occasions, Darn Tough socks, Ski socks, Basketball socks, running socks, funny theme socks, Sock Monkeys and Sock Dolls. Gift cards to places that sell socks, like Dick’s, The Sock Market, or any apparel shop.
Quatt: Spa Day- Donation suggestions: spa socks, lotions, hair towel, foot care set, candies, bubble bath, bath salt, hand soap, pedicure set, candles, bath fizzers, bath pillow, diffuser, massager, nail polish, tea, gift certificate to spa.
Wesnak: Games Galore- Donation suggestions: Card games, board games for all ages (Pictionary, Apples to Apples, Scrabble, Life, Candy Land, Clue, Cranium, etc.), dice games, book of card game rules, hand
held video games, gift card to stores like Toys R Us, Best Buy or Wal-Mart.

The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
    We had a nice trip to the Flynn this week to see a performance of The Giver. It was a one person performance that required a lot of imagination from the audience. The acting was great, but I think many students were expecting more from the experience. If you are looking for a movie to watch over the break, watching The Giver and having and a talk about how the book compares to the movie might be nice activity.
    With theme week and the snow day, we had little time to wrap up the book and our study of Lewis and Clark. We had a couple of short lessons and activities on each. Students completed their storyboards for The Giver (part of their Reading Response Notebooks), and played a choose your own adventure online game of Lewis and Clark. They had to record and analyze their decisions as they played the game.
    On Friday, the teachers and staff of Voyager hosted morning fun activities, between the Mardi Gras parade, assembly, and faculty/student basketball game. It was a very fun and full day. Be sure to ask your student about it.
Also, don’t forget that students should be reading 20-30 minutes per day. Make a trip to the library over the break, if your student does not have a good book!

The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):

Math 5:  Students have done a marvelous job on this multiplication and division unit.  I’ve been so impressed by this group’s commitment to learning and to each other.  The unit assessment was given on Thursday.

Math 6:  6th Graders are bumbling through the fraction operations work and I’m finding confusion abounds!

Science ⅚:  We did a few demonstrations this week in order to understand the role that air and water play in weather systems.  We heated and cooled a model of the Earth with a heat lamp and then measured temperature over time on the equator, tropics and poles and found that the Earth doesn’t heat equally.  This unequal heating drives air into motion and this causes weather.  We also heated water and soil to see how quickly it heated up and cooled down.  This moved us further forward by helping us understand that unequal heating of land and water also drive weather patterns.  We made weather instruments on Monday and recorded data all week, adding further value to our understanding of wind speed, direction, temperature and air pressure affect weather systems.  Quite a bit of work was collected this week.  Jupiter Grades will be updated by break’s end.

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities)

This week started off with our usual Independent Reading time in the morning. As the week continued on we finished up our work with identifying themes in “The Giver”. The final themes that we discussed were: Sameness vs. Diversity and Individuality. By looking at these themes we examined the utopian society/community of “The Giver” and discussed advantages, disadvantages, and how our differences make us distinctly human. We ended the week with students creating utopian societies and then voting as a class on the society they would most like to live in. On Friday we celebrated the conclusion of Theme Week with the Mardi Gras Parade and a Voyager Team Breakfast.

In the afternoon we continued to focus and work on our 1960’s graphic novels. Students all have accounts with Pixton, so they are all beginning to build and create their graphic novels. Students are having a lot of fun with the creative freedoms that come with Pixton, and they are really bringing their stories to life with great characters and backgrounds. They are even uploading pictures from the 1960’s (using Creative Commons) to bring authentic aspects of the time period to their stories. It has been a really fun week, and it all came to a close with the Staff vs. Student Basketball game on Friday afternoon! I hope everyone has a fantastic break!

The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):

CMP7
With the snow day, Flynn trip and Theme week activities, we had an abridged math week.  Finding multiple ways to solve unit rates was the order of business and students worked together to find connect unit rates, with rate of change and linear equations. The Comparing and Scaling book is a short exploration that introduces a term called the “Constant of Proportionality” which is another name for the unit rate, slope and rate of change.  This concept is an important one as we begin our study of linear equations.  We will complete this unit after break.  If students have some “free” time over the vacation, I would recommend doing some IXL work.

CMP8
In our abridged class this week we explored different types of functions called “Piecewise Functions”  We looked at functions that are like steps, linear functions that have several rates of change and the absolute value function.  The function notation or f(x) is very different from the  equations forms we have seen.  Here are two video links that explain what these functions are and how they are notated.  When we get back from break we will return to some of our well-known functions and begin the exploration of function transformations.



Science 7th/8th
We pulled out the bunsen burners and ring stands to explore the physical property of boiling points and what happens when you add a solute to the universal solvent, water. How and why does adding salt or sugar to water change the boiling point?  During the experiment we were able to utilize our new GoTemp temperature probes that allow us to accurately document temperature over time.  Although we had a few mishaps with broken beakers and spills students were able to discern that by adding mass (sugar, salt) to the solvent (water) the boiling point was increased.  Want to know why? This would be a great discussion to have over break or perhaps when preparing a pasta dinner.  After break we will spend a few more weeks exploring chemical change.


Friday, February 12, 2016

Week of February 8th -12th

TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Greetings Team Voyager!
 
Voyager Families- Please start saving any and all items to donate to Voyager’s Recycle Sale!
Save The Date: Sale is March 26th

Big Basket Raffle
Collections for the 16th Annual Big Basket Raffle and Silent Auction are underway!  This is one of FAP’s biggest fundraisers of the year, with proceeds funding FAP programs that support all WCS and ABS students, families and staff.  Items donated by our Williston School District families will be made into beautiful themed baskets that will be raffled off at the BIG BASKET RAFFLE on Saturday, April 2nd, 2016.
Merrill: Spice it Up!- Donation suggestions: Hot sauce, Spice rubs Gourmet salts, Salsa, BBQ sauce, Chutney, Cookbooks about spicy foods, dried hot peppers, and gift cards to Mexicali or any other restaurant with a spicy theme. Gift cards to specialty markets.
O’Brien: Sock it to Me!- Donation suggestions: Socks for all ages and occasions, Darn Tough socks, Ski socks, Basketball socks, running socks, funny theme socks, Sock Monkeys and Sock Dolls. Gift cards to places that sell socks, like Dick’s, The Sock Market, or any apparel shop.
Quatt: Spa Day- Donation suggestions: spa socks, lotions, hair towel, foot care set, candies, bubble bath, bath salt, hand soap, pedicure set, candles, bath fizzers, bath pillow, diffuser, massager, nail polish, tea, gift certificate to spa.
Wesnak: Games Galore- Donation suggestions: Card games, board games for all ages (Pictionary, Apples to Apples, Scrabble, Life, Candy Land, Clue, Cranium, etc.), dice games, book of card game rules, hand
held video games, gift card to stores like Toys R Us, Best Buy or Wal-Mart.

It's time to register your girls for Girls on the Run (grades 3-5) and Heart & Sole (grades 6-8)! Registration will open at 7AM on Wednesday, February 17th and will fill up very quickly! Please be sure to register early. Girls will go on a waiting list once the allotted spots are filled.
Groups will be as follows:
GOTR:
Group A: Tu & Thu 3-4:30p   Group B: Mon & Wed 5:30-7p  Group C: Tu & Thu 5:30-7p
Heart & Sole:  Tues & Thurs 5:30-7p
At GOTR, we strive to help each girl find her limitless potential by showing her how to feel healthy, joyful and confident! GOTR is so much more than a running program!
Our 10 week season starts the week of March 21st and meetings are twice a week for 90 minutes each. We culminate our season with our celebratory 5k event on Saturday, June 4, 2016 at the Fairgrounds in Essex!
For more information about GOTR, please visit our website atwww.girlsontherunvermont.org, call or email Rachel at 802-503-7097Rachel@girlsontherunvermont.org, or like our Facebook page Girls on the Run Vermont!
*Come visit the WCS lobby from 2-3:30p on Tues, Feb 16 to learn more about the program!

Message from ⅚ Intern:
My name is Alexandria (Ally) Rice and I’m one of your new Student Teaching Interns! I originally hail from a small town near the Shenandoah Mountains in Northern Virginia. However, I decided upon entering college that Vermont would be a fabulous new adventure and, consequently, I am now a senior in the Middle Level Education Program with concentrations in History and English at the University of Vermont (Go Catamounts!)! This semester I will be working with students in Mr. Merrill’s fifth and sixth grade Humanities classes on a variety of lessons, activities, and projects. I am eager to get to know each and every student in order to best help support them in (and outside of) the classroom!

I feel so fortunate to work with Team Voyager and am so excited to work with you all this year! Thanks so much for welcoming me into your wonderful community!

The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
    This week we continued our study of The Giver. In preparation of our field trip to the Flynn next week, students participated in several pre performance lessons. Students created utopian societies, and analyzed the idea of control and censorship in society. We also added more words to our tier two lists and did some “popcorn” reading with several passages of the book.
We are looking forward to the performance on Wednesday.
    We also continued our study of Lewis and Clark. Students marked the route of Lewis and Clark on large physical maps, noting the rivers, mountain ranges, and modern day states and and cities that they passed through.  We brainstormed obstacles that they faced - terrain, climate, and animals/plants. Following the brainstorm, we watched segments of the documentary - Lewis and Clark: The Corps of Discovery, noting the actual obstacles and challenges they faced. Students will select an obstacle to journal about next week, after they read the actual journals of Lewis and Clark.

The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
5th Grade Math:  We are moving toward closure on our big unit on standard algorithm for multiplication and division.  Students have solid proficiency in a number of strategies for multiplying and dividing but some may not be at the standard algorithm.  This is okay.  They continue to make the needed relationships between ratio tables and area models in order to feel good about the transition to a less conceptual generalization in the “mom and dad’s” way of doing math.  They will get there.  Assessment on Tuesday and then onto Geometry!

6th Grade Math:  As we finish Let’s Be Rational, know that proficiency is expected for operations with fractions. While most students are comfortable with algorithms that work for addition and subtraction, multiplication and division algorithms are relatively new. Most students have understanding of fraction of problems as multiplication and have some tried and true solution strategies.  We have discovered some great division strategies but the idea of multiply by the reciprocal is very new.  We worked all week relating strategies.  We will continue to work those out next week as we review for the final Unit Assessment for Let’s Be Rational.

⅚ Science:  This week Sean Parker, a local meteorological broadcaster, visited our classroom and gave us a firsthand look at just how difficult weather forecasting is.  The students asked great questions and seemed very curious about the data used to predict the weather.  See photos below.

On Monday, we will begin creating weather instruments to measure changes in wind direction, wind speed, temperature, and air pressure.  We need one liter bottles!  Thanks for saving and bringing them in!

Our final project for the weather unit is to write two LEAF paragraphs. I will assign these on Friday and they are due before break.  See Google Classroom for the assignment.

Our upcoming unit is Cells and Human Body.  During this unit we solve engineering problems related to the human body, like building prosthetics, but also we do a dissection.  My friend, Bob Lobel, who is a cardiologist at UVM med, has come in to help with the heart dissections in the past.  If you are interested in joining the dissection block, please let me know.  It is an elective opportunity for students.
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The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
During our morning classes we focused on identifying themes in “The Giver”. We started off by having students brainstorm themes that they thought were present in the story. Common themes that students came up with were: justice, change, love, truth, and courage. After discussing why these were common themes in the story for us, we independently read a packet about the underlying themes and layers in “The Giver” according to the author of the book Lois Lowry. Students read the packet first on their own, while highlighting and interacting with the text leaving notes about what statements stood out or seemed important to them. After having read the packet and interview, students ranked the 7 themes written about in the packet. According to our students the most important themes or underlying messages in “The Giver” are: choice, sameness versus diversity, and family. We then did a close reading of the section of the packet about the theme of “choice”. We then discussed why choice was such an important theme in the book and how it made an impact on the society and way of life for characters in the book. We also discussed what choices we have in our everyday life and why having choices are so important to our society and our freedoms. We then went into a simulation much like the Ceremony of Twelves in “The Giver” and students were assigned their careers for life, without any choice! Jobs were similar to those in “The Giver” and ranged from Fish Hatchery Assistant to Cart-Puller to Mold Scraper to Pipeworks Laborer to Director of Recreation and of course, The Receiver of Memories. Students, as you can imagine, had a wide range of responses to this activity depending on what job they were given. Students reflected on how they felt about their jobs, whether or not they matched their strengths, and why it is so important for people to be able to choose their own paths in life.

Our afternoon classes have been dedicated to time for students to work on their 1960’s graphic novels. The storylines I’ve heard so far have sounded great! Students are really pulling in their gained knowledge of the 60’s and applying it in creative ways. We have stories highlighting the Vietnam War, the draft, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”, JFK, and the Civil Rights Movement. We are taking this project step by step by having students complete a series of graphic organizers prior to starting to build their graphic novels in Pixton. Students had to complete an idea map, a completed plot triangle, character t-charts for each main character, and detailed storyboards. On Friday Pixton was introduced and students were able to create accounts in our online Pixton classroom. We are very excited to get started in Pixton, and I can’t wait to see these Graphic Novels come to life!

The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
Students have been working on unit rates, ratios and proportions with many different situations, like pizza and juice mixes, mapping skills and pasta prices.  Being able to manipulate part-to-part, part-to-whole and whole-to-whole is an important part of this investigation.  We have also explored how linear equations have a “constant of proportionality” and how it relates to the graph, table and equation.

CMP8
This week began with the 8th graders taking the “Frogs, Fleas and Painted Cube” Assessment.  Kudos to the class for a 95% average!  We haved moved from quadratic equations to function notation. Which is a math language with its own symbols such as  f(x)= 2x + 2.  We learned about inputs and outputs, domain and ranges.

Science 7th/8th
This week students have been researching the physical and chemical properties of elements from the Periodic Table. They created Superhero and Villain characters based on the characteristics of the element that they selected.  We shared them in class on Friday, and we will be placing our Periodic Table up on a wall in Voyager House for all to see.  Students created beautiful work!

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Friday, February 5, 2016

Week of Feb 1st - 5th

TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***

The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We continued our literature study of The Giver. Students started to make a storyboard in their Reading Response Notebook; identifying the exposition, conflict, and rising action in the book. Students also worked on vocabulary from the book and engaged in some great discussions about this utopian society.
We also kicked off our unit on Lewis and Clark. We started by learning about the Louisiana Purchase, and then we moved into a cooperative learning activity that provided students with background information about life in 1803, just before the launch of the expedition. Part of that work included comparing maps from that time period to maps today; students noticed many differences between the maps.  We then took our orders from Thomas Jefferson and wrote our first journal entry as members of the Corps of Discovery, just about to start the Journey of Discovery.

The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5:  We did it!  We made the leap to the traditional standard algorithm for multiplying two numbers.  Bridges carefully builds students up to this algorithm by providing many strategies for solving problems and some students will lean on those strategies, because they know they work, before moving into the most efficient of them all:  “my parents’ way.”  The transition is clunky, because the standard algorithm is the least conceptual of all ways, but still honors place value and is recipe like.  The recipe is good for students, because once in the habit, they can just follow it every time.  We practiced this all week!

Math 6:  We have moved solidly into division of fractions this week inventing strategies that work every time.  The way we all learned to divide fractions, invert and multiply is where we will end up, but is not where we focused our week.  When you help students, try to get them to lean on the work they have in their learning log.

Science ⅚:  This week we looked at modeling air puppies based on an anchoring phenomenon of hot water in a plastic water bottle.  See models below.

We began investigations of air puppies today!  See some photos of our icy cold lemonade and the thought experiment performed to observe what will happen to the icy cold lemonade glass and the room temperature glass of water.
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Message from one of our 5/6 Interns:
My name is Erin Kiely and I am from Hollis, NH. I am currently a senior attending the University of Vermont where I am majoring in middle level education and minoring in special education. This semester I am student teaching with Ms. O’Brien and will be spending some time in Mr. Merrill’s classroom as well. After February break, I will be leading a unit in Humanities on slavery with Ally Rice, another UVM intern. Later on in the year I will be doing my solo teaching in math and science. I have enjoyed the time I have spent here so far, and am looking forward to the rest of the year.

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):

This week during our morning classes we had a couple days of fun, creative writing with journal prompts, and ended the week focusing on identifying theme in literature. Students practiced identifying theme in a couple of different ways. First, they tried identifying theme in a variety of children’s books on Thursday, and on Friday they became movie critics and identified themes in movies by viewing different clips. Friday’s class was very fun and lively, and all students walked away with a clear understanding of theme and how it differs from the subject or topic of the story. As a class we came to the conclusion that theme is the underlying message or universal truth that the story is trying to tell us such as good vs evil or love conquers all.

In our afternoon classes students literally took a walk through 20th Century History with the help of our GIANT timeline of the 20th century. We looked for common trends, patterns, cause and effect examples, and we also examined how long certain wars were. Upon returning to class we discussed the 1960’s and how full that decade was with movements, wars, change, and innovation. This was the perfect transition into diving deeper into learning about the Vietnam War. We spent some time discussing geography and the impact it can have on a war specifically in Vietnam. We then viewed a documentary on the war and discussed how the war not only made an impact on the world but on the United States and the culture of our country. After having worked through station-based learning activities on the 1960’s, discussing the impact of the 60’s, and viewing/reflecting on the Vietnam War, students were introduced to their 1960’s project. This project will be for students (in pairs or independently) to create a historical fiction graphic novel using Pixton, which is an online comic builder. Students will be asked to synthesize the knowledge and information gained from our studies of the 60’s and apply them to a story of their own creation that takes place during that time period. We are taking this project step by step with students completing brainstorms, idea webs, character charts, and storyboards prior to starting on Pixton. We will also be fact checking our work to make sure that not only our dates and names are accurate to the time, but that our pop culture references, trends, and clothing match with the time period as well.

The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
We began the week with a taste test of a variety of lemon/lime caffeine free sodas. We created mathematical statements comparing the different brands using ratios and percentages. We reviewed part to part and part to whole ratios when figuring out which orange juice was the most and least “orangey”.  We did a lot of work around juice recipes, converting to different measures likes cups to ounces, and we used our scaling up and shrinking down to figure out how much concentrate and water was needed in a variety of situations.  We finished off the week with ratio and proportion stations, biological sampling situations and pizza serving problems.

CMP8
This week we were impacted by the World Language Exams, so homework was kept to a minimum. We completed our Frogs, Fleas and Painted Cubes Unit by looking at the motion of frogs, fleas and basketball players and balls that are thrown from different heights.  We learned about the force of gravity and the opposite force of an object being thrown.This motion creates a parabola and students have learned to create graphs and equations modeling this behavior.  We completed the week with creating catapults.  Using corks, slow motion cameras and tape measures, students worked to create equations of the flight.  We ended with a FFPC jeopardy game to prepare for our unit test on Monday.

Science 7th/8th
We began the week with a recap of our Solubility Lab and a lively debate over whether salt placed in solution was a chemical or physical change?  We then turned our attention to the Periodic Table of Elements.  Students created color coded tables showing the different groupings within the table and how the table is organized.  We began our Superhero/Super Villain Element Project.  Over the next week students will research the physical and chemical properties of their selected element and create a superhero or villain with attributes that incorporate their element’s properties.  They will write a brief “bio” and create a drawing that will be part of the class periodic table.