Week of February 6-10

TA’s Notes:

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

No School: Monday, February 27th - Friday, March 3rd

VOYAGER RECYCLE SALE

ALL Voyager Families:

The Voyager Recycle Sale is Saturday, April 1st!  Save the date!

This is our biggest, most fun event of the year.  A giant indoor yard sale!!!!  Please start to gather anything you'd like to donate...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!

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

We kicked off two big projects this week. The stock market game officially started on Monday. Students put their research to use by making their first investments in the game. The rules require each team to purchase 5 stocks in the first 5 weeks and spend $50,000. The game runs for 10 weeks and teams win by having the highest total equity for their portfolios. Students are competing against teams across the state.

Voyager kicked off its Poetry Slam unit with a trip to the Flynn to see Mayhem Poets. This group of performance poets mix hip hop, theatre, stand up comedy and serious poetry together for an amazing show. During the unit, students will participate in poetry writing, performance, and interpretation workshops to create their own poetry performance for a Poetry slam contest at the end of next week.

Workshops on rhythm, voice, body percussion, public speaking, and choreography!

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

Important Note: Aron and I will need to change the spring conference day! I have an appointment in Boston on that day that cannot be changed.  We are sorry for this inconvenience.  We will be sending out a new schedule for conferences next week, so you can make advanced plans to attend.  Thanks for being flexible!

Math 5 and 6:

We participated in several days of studying the “math” behind the stock market.  This mathematical work was designed to provide mathematical skills and understandings to playing the game and making wise decisions as you take risks with the allotted $100,000.  The workshops focused on and potentially answered these three questions:  

• What causes stock values to change?  We looked at phenomena like decreased supply of good cocoa for making chocolate; how weather might be to blame for rising costs; how natural disasters or tragic events like Hurricane Katrina can favor some companies and hurt others.  
• How can the value of our money grow?  We looked specifically at interest bearing savings.  We looked at the Tale of Two Savers.  Ron started saving young and did so for 6 years.  He then left his money in his savings account, without withdrawal for another 9.  His friend, David, didn’t start saving until six years after Ron, and then saved for 10 years.  Who had more money after the 15 years?  RON!  The motto is SAVE for as long as you can!
• When do you buy, sell, or hold stock?  We looked at 6 companies and phenomena (like Martha Stewart goes to jail because of insider trading) to see how that might affect your decisions to buy, sell, or hold your stock.  This was fun! Ask your child what they decided given perceived risk and benefit.

⅚ Science:

We only worked on creating a Gravity Test this week.  This is the final project in our early gravity work.  We will get back to the Solar System after the poetry slam unit.  

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

CMP8

The 8th grade class is working hard on quadratic equations, equivalent expressions and finding landmarks on parabolas that are reflected in the factored form and standard form.  Through class discussion and utilization of Desmos, our online graphing calculator, we can create parabolas that are “thin” and “wide” due to the coefficient of x2, their maximum/minimum point (vertex), line of symmetry, y-intercept and x intercepts.

http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-algebra/s12-05-graphing-parabolas.htm

CMP7

Students are deligently working on their “Shrink it Down and Blow it up” projects.  Many have gotten through shrinking and enlarging, but our the last task is to make a distorted image that uses a rule like 2x,y.  This means that the horizontal dimension is doubled, but the vertical dimension stays the same.  

Science 7th/8th

During the poetry unit, students will give up their science period through next week.  However this week students were working on thier “Life in the Universe” essay.  During our Alien Planet project students were given scientific articles, astronomy websites and videos as resources as they created their planets and aliens.  This 3-5 LEAF paragraph essay asked the question:

Why is the work of astrobiologists important? What would it mean to find life elsewhere in the universe? The deadline for this essay was on Thursday.