TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Dates to Remember:
Wednesday, October 12th - No School
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) Fri 5/6 Conference
Monday, October 24th - ⅚ Parent Conferences Mon 5/6 Conference
Friday, October 28th - ⅚ Field Trip to State House, Supreme Court and VT Historical Museum
Friday, Nov. 4th - Voyager’s Book & Medial Sale Set-up
Saturday, Nov. 5th - Voyager’s Book & Media Sale
***8th Grade Families***
Saturday, October 15th from 8am - 11am at WCS will be the first 8th Grade Trip Fundraiser, a Williston School Fall Fest- Pancake Breakfast & Touch-A-Truck Event with Williston Police, Fire & More
8th grader students and families are needed as volunteers for this fundraising event in order to keep trip cost low or none!! click HERE to sign-up!
Proceeds from this event will benefit the WCS 8th Grade Trip and Williston Foodservice.
After school with Ms. Sherman:
We have been noticing some students getting behind on their work or struggling to remember what they need to get done. We would like to help! This is a reminder that homework club is in session. It is every Tuesday and Thursday. Tuesdays from 2:00-3:30 and Thursdays from 3:00-4:30. There is a late bus available on both days for transportation. Only students that stay after school for after-school support, such as homework club or Spark, are allowed to ride the bus. This means students that are going to the Dorothy Allen Library for the afternoon should not be riding the bus. Students will meet in Mr. Merrill’s classroom and will be dismissed to the front lobby.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
Students selected a candidate for the upcoming candidate forum. They researched, drafted, and made a final poster for their candidate to display in the auditorium and around the school when the candidates arrive next Friday. All students received feedback and a formative score on their poster draft before moving on to their final large poster work.
We also started an essay writing assignment this week. Students will be writing an essay about government based on the book - A Long Walk to Water. Our focus will be on gathering evidence to support our topic. We will search for evidence in the Reading Response Notebook, the Water for Sudan website, and the book itself. We will finish our graphic organizers for the essay next week, and move on to drafting and editing.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: We had a busy week of expression writing, learning strategies for multiplication and reviewing volume and surface area of rectangular prisms. Assessment is on Monday!
Math 6: We moved out of part to part ratios and into part to whole fractions! Significant learning this week included What is a rational number? What are opposites on the number line, what is absolute value, and how does absolute value help us determine the magnitude of a number. Comparing Bits Check up was on Wednesday. Students will receive results next week.
Science: Our learning this week was focused on Why plants are so Important? Students analyzed their plant plots in order to answer the question, was my plot biodiverse? They also spent time brainstorming ideas about plants’ importance by researching temperate and tropical biomes and we held our first scientist meeting. We set norms and then gathered group ideas about why plants are important to us, the Earth, other living things. We then pursued an investigation to collect data about exterior and interior temperatures on buildings with black roofs and green roofs. See photos below.
The Week in Mr. G’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in Humanities we continued reading and discussing our literature books. We learned how to run a democratic meeting and students in each grade discussed and voted how to use the class time left to us. After giving arguments for both sides, eighth grade voted to use the time for class discussion and seventh grade voted to work on independent reading. In the afternoon, we began debating the 1776 revolution.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
As we work through our unit, Thinking with Mathematical Models, students have been fine tuning their linear equation skills. Skills like finding a line from two points, a graph, a non-sequential table and word problems. IXL is also enhancing their practice of these skills and it is my expectation that students work 10-15 minutes per night on these skills during the week. It has been great to hear students make the connection with our physics lab by thinking about line of best fit with our data on mass and force. They are making excellent connections between math and science in the real world!
CMP7
We made some excellent breakthroughs in class this week and many students shared their thinking about the internal angle sums of all sorts of polygons. Some examples included drawing triangles within a polygon and adding the sum.
Or cutting off the corners of a polygon to find out their sum.
We also worked through a rotation of 12 stations that focused on a variety of geometry skills. As we continue through our Shapes and Designs Unit students will continue to work on their geometry skills 10-15 minutes a day with IXL.
Science 7th/8th
This week we explored more experiments with cars, ramps and our new motion sensors. Our guiding question was: What happens to the velocity of a moving object when we change its position? The Vernier Go Motion Sensors use echolocation to capture the change of position and the velocity. Students recorded and interpreted their graphs in their science journals and analyzed what we saw. We ended the week with the introduction of our first engineering task. Over the next week we will be researching, building, testing and rebuilding a car powered by a mouse trap. The goal is to create a fast car that can move 5 meters.
