Week of January 9th - 13th

TA’s Notes:

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

• No School Monday, Jan 16th

Heads up to parents: Thera-putty has been a bit of a problem this week in classrooms so teachers will be taking it away from students if this behavior continues and additional thera-putty should not be purchased for students.

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.

A Message from Ms. Sherman on Behalf of Voyager:

Over the years our building tools and supplies have been depleted. We are on the hunt for donated items! If you find yourself with multiple items in your possession, we would LOVE to take them off your hands. Some things that we are looking for, but not limited to are:

1. Hand Tools like: Screwdrivers, Hammers, simple saws, etc.
2. Power drills/drivers
3. Tool boxes
4. Nails, screws, bolts, etc.
5. Wood glue and other odds and ends for building

And….While you’re cleaning out your tool area, just a reminder that we will also have our annual recycle sale again this late winter and we need your stuff!!!! We are seeking good quality, gently used belongings to sell! A good sale all depends on the donated items we receive. Items that are great sellers include: furniture items, clean and complete games and toys, and functioning electronics. We also take other household goods such as decor and clothing, but we would love to increase our availability of the other items that have been listed. Our recycle sale has been set for: April 1st!!!

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

Monday

• Reading Cafe - Students continued to read independent books and work in their Reading Response notebooks.
• Current Events News Quiz with Mr. Maika.

Tuesday

• Introduction to mini argument writing and debate unit.  Students were placed on teams and selected topics to debate. We then worked on highlighting important reasons and evidence to use in an argument writing piece for the selected topic.

Wednesday

• Students worked with their debate team to write an argument outline. We used an organizer and reviewed writing strategies as students wrote each component of their argument.  They used their organizers to type a draft.
• We reviewed the debate format, planner, and scoring expectations. Debate teams completed their debate planners and worked out a strategy for the debate.

Thursday and Friday

• Students completed their final arguments, practiced, and debated in front of the class. The debates were impressive and longer than expected due to their great research, preparation, and enthusiasm.

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

Math 5:  Our new unit introduces and reinforces strategies for multiplication and division of numbers. The way Bridges approaches this is through relationship building.  Bridges strings groups of problems together, like ¼ of 8, ¾ of 8, 25 x 8 and .75 x 8 to get kiddos thinking about quick strategies for solving these problems.  You can see that through this process kids are multiplying fractions, whole numbers, and decimals (principles that are generally taught separately).  This is a very successful way to reinforce strategies like ratio tables, ¼’s being half of a half, ¾ as 3x one fourth.  It makes me smile when kids have ah ha moments like so many did this week.  We are moving toward standard algorithms, multiplication first and then division.

Math 6:  Students have been tackling some area and perimeter concepts this week that have allowed them to generalize relationships, between the length and width of shapes, generalize strategies for rectangles, and explore connections between the area of rectangles and triangles.  Students are doing geometry on the side too, engaging in some self-directed learning for geometry concepts I am not providing instruction for (like lines, corresponding angles, and the rule of supplementary angles for example).  You will notice lab sheets in math folders that show that students are building models for constant area and constant perimeter problems and then graphing some of that data.  We also continue to address recently acquired skills like adding and multiplying fractions (when finding perimeter and area respectively).

⅚ Science:

• Engaged in Dropping Objects Investigation
• Engaged in the development of experimental questions and defined the same, change, measure variables.
• Organized tables for collecting data and then ran trials and filled in data tables
• Met as a group of scientists to discuss findings in order to answer the question, what object will hit first?
• Looked at the relationship between F of gravity, the mass, and motion.
• Ran a pendulum experiment to further develop explanations about how mass affects which object hits first.

The Week in Mr. G's Room:

This week in 7/8 Humanities we discussed the push factors that lead groups of people to move to another country. We used the case study of the Irish Potato famine. In the 1840's more than a million Irish peasants starved to death in spite of the fact that Irish farmers produced more than enough food to feed twice the population of Ireland. How could this happen? We conducted a mock trial to determine the culprit. 

We also held the preliminary round for the National Geographic Geo Bee. After a tough competition, we narrowed the field to two students, Jamie Doyle and Jake Ludwar. In the final elimination round Jake received a near perfect score and was chosen to represent Voyager in the school wide Geo Bee next Friday.

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

CMP8

We had some major breakthroughs in math class this week. We have a better understanding of how the Pythagorean Theorem is used and how it makes sense in the context of right triangles.  We created a class record for all things Pythagorean and steps for finding square and cube roots without using a calculator.  We finished the week with beginning our Partner Quiz.  We will be completing this unit within the next week.

CMP7

We made strides this week in seeing the relationship between scale factor, area and perimeter.  In midweek Ms. Sequeira led us through a hands-on investigation where we utilized tiles to create figures and then increased them by different scale factors.  Students took a Check-up and we began an investigation on rep-tiles and tessellations.    

Science 7th/8th

Students completed their universe timelines!  Many were well done and will be displayed in class. We focused on the time approximately 9 billion years from the Big Bang.  This was the beginning of our solar system, which exploded out of a star and a swirling cloud of material.  We looked closely at the planets within our solar system and the story they tell of how they were formed.  We analyzed several comparison graphs such as planet diameter and planetary distance from the sun and noticed a relationship in how gas giants and terrestrial planets were formed.  We finished our week learning about the Goldilocks Zone, an area around a sun for habitable planets, and what attributes and materials are needed to sustain and create an environment for life.