Week of January 3rd - 6th

TA’s Notes:

***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***

• No School Monday, Jan 16th

8th Graders:

Baby Photos wanted for Yearbook!  These pictures can be turned in to me with your name and “Voyager” on the back so they can be returned or emailed to KFieldsend@cssu.org.

Swift House is sponsoring Marko the Magician, Friday, January 27th at 6:30pm in the WCS Auditorium.  Tickets are $8 each, order tickets using form: Marko the Magician Form

The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):

• Independent Reading in Reading Cafe: Students should have an independent reading book that they are committed to reading over the next two weeks.

• National Geographic Bee: Students played geography games, prepared for and participated in this national competition.
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Wrap Up: Final reflection and compare/contrast (book to movie) essay.
• Trout in the Classroom: 100 brook trout eggs from the Roxbury Fish Hatchery arrived courtesy of our local Central Vermont Trout Unlimited volunteers. Students will learn how to test our tank water and care for our eggs. Hatch date is March 14.

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

Now that Jumprope is live, you and your Voyager should check once a week to see updated scores.  We do our best to get the scores into Jumprope as soon as we can.  Please know that the students and I touch student work 3-4 times before an assessment score is derived.  

Google Classroom will serve as an ongoing planner for you.  You can see assignments there and then check the scores on Jumprope.  Homework is done in two week increments.  So you will not see daily records of whether say, Tuesday’s assignment was completed.  You will only see a cumulative score from a two week time period.  

I have shared my New Year’s Resolution for the ⅚ students:  you will all meet proficiency on homework!  I am asking students to stay in for recess (I know, I know) to complete the day’s assignment if it is not complete by the class period in which it is due.  So far we have 100% homework completion.  I want students to run around, and as a mom of boys, I know the value of recess.  I am trying this to see if I can decrease the high number of “homework no shows” each day.  I will let you know if your child is consistently missing recess.  The squeeze will reap benefits, I know.

Math 5:

Highlights from the week…

• Division with Base Ten Pieces
• Unit 3 Final Assessment
• Revisiting Ratio Tables and using them to solve multiplication and division problems
• Beginning of efficient strategies for multiplying and dividing.  The traditional standard algorithm is coming!

Math 6:  

• Students have worked their way through Let’s be Rational.  Scores will be posted on Jumprope soon.
• Beginning work on Geometry.
• Review packet ( a big one) assigned to review points, lines, rays, segments, and angles.
• Extensive conceptual building of area and perimeter

⅚ Science:  If your kiddo wants to walk the dog before bedtime, let them!  They are watching the moon!  Students have a month long assignment to view the moon when they can and when the moon is visible!  I will have students staple the moon journal into their planner, so it is always there!   If students don’t see it, they are welcome to use the link below to find the phase that wasn’t visible.  Students have a Lunar Phase Journal Task Card that accompanies their yellow, cardstock moon journal.  Keep an eye out for it.

Also, students began investigations related to gravity.  Have you ever drop a weighted ball and a tennis fall of the exact same volume and shape at the same time?  Well ⅚ students are doing just that.  We will have photos for next week, but for now, know that we are focusing on experimental design:  good questions, same/change/measure variable identification, planning data tables, choosing material and ultimately running trials.  

The Week in Mr. G’s Room (⅞ Humanities):

Happy New Year!

This week in Humanities we are getting back into the swing of things. We are beginning our Immigration Unit covering both current events and earlier waves of immigration in American History. We are working to incorporate what we learned through the novel writing unit last year into students' independent reading this year. Also we working to incorporate Personal Learning Plan reflections into the weekly routine. You may have noticed you are getting emails from your student regarding their goals and the work they have done toward them. Each email should state a student's goal, what he or she has done to work toward that goal in the past week, and what a student plans on doing to work towards his or her goal in the coming week.

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

CMP8

We entered 2017 with investigations on the Pythagorean Theorem. Remember the a2+ b2 = c2 that we memorized  when we studied math? This equation was actually based on the adding up the area of boxes from the sides of a right triangle. We pondered and tested whether this theorem could work with acute and obtuse triangles.

This week we also practiced fractional roots and simplifying radicals.  Students performed an entrance task and we explored my “favorite no”, this is an example of a problem that is solved improperly. As a class we dissect it to see what was done correctly and what was not.

CMP7

We began the New Year with reviewing how to plot points on a cartesian coordinate plan. Students were tasked with creating cartoon characters called Wumps.

Using different rules, we created similar and dissimilar Wump figures.  We explored what happens to a  figure when we multiply our (x,y) coordinates by a coefficient such as (3x,3y).  We also explored  what happens to a figure when we add or subtract numbers from our coordinates like (x + 2, y - 1) We discussed what attributes a similar figure has.

Science 7th/8th

We began the week with a kick-off of our astronomy unit with a model of the Big Bang! We discussed space, time and where our solar system fits into the big picture.....what a big picture it is.  Students are being tasked with creating an astronomical timeline from the Big Bang to present day.  Students have been given a fairly dense reading assignment and will complete their timeline next week.