TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
The new deadline to order a Yearbook is Wednesday, February 22nd.
Please note, no additional yearbooks will be ordered.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We started preparing for the Stock Market game this week. The Stock Market Game
Is an online simulation of the global capital markets that engages students in the world of economics, investing and personal finance. Students work in teams to invest 100,000 virtual dollars in stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Students practiced team building skills and how to make it to consensus. This will be important when they start making decisions about how to invest their money. In the first 5 weeks, teams must invest in at least 5 different stocks and spend a minimum of $50,000. Lessons on what is a company? What is a stock? What is risk? And what is diversification? Will be taught before the first orders are placed Monday afternoon.
Poetry Slam Competition - On Wednesday we will be going to the Flynn Theater to see Mayhem Poets. This is a poetry performance field trip that will kick off our 5-8 Poetry Slam unit. Students will work in groups to create their own poetry slam performance for Friday, February 17th. In morning classes students will write poetry based on a selected theme. They will the work with their group to write a final poem and performance during our afternoon periods. Students will work on crafting poetry with poetic language, a point of view, and conveying human emotion. Vocal elements (tone, volume, pitch, pace, rhythm, gesture) will also be judged in the competition.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
5th GRADERS! We spent every day this week enforcing a clean cubby policy. No snack
Math 5: It was a busy week of dividing multi-digit numbers using ratio tables and area models. The purpose of these strategies is to see that multiplication and division, albeit opposite operations, can be used simultaneously when solving problems. See the example below.
The idea behind showing students these interacting strategies is that they can then visualize division in different ways. Many students have a sense of the standard algorithm but haven’t yet mastered the process. Keep showing them this if you like. For now, students are having great success understanding the divisor represents groups of, as both the ratio and area model indicate.
Unit Assessment was today!
Math 6: More Geometry this week! We worked on coordinate graphing this week, reviewing x,y coordinate points and how to use coordinates to find area and perimeter of polygons in space. We also reviewed Volume and Surface Area. We will take our assessment on Tuesday.
We will be taking advantage of some of the math necessary to play the Stock Market game by looking at decimals, daily trading options, and growth of money over time. Students will keep regular watch over rising and falling stock values and graphing this data to look at trends and patterns. When do you sell? What should you buy? The graphs will tell us so!
⅚ Science:
Pictures speak louder than words! Take a look at our week’s worth of learning!
The Week in Mr. G’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
We worked on public speaking throughout this week. Students did research for a project of their choice relating to immigration, and then prepared a three minute speech based on this research. On Thursday we had two guest teachers, Stan Williams and Emily Rinkema, from CVU give a demonstration class for us. Students did work in separate groups on different challenges related to public speaking. On Monday students will present their speeches to the full class.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
Students started the week investigating the area of squares and what happens to the area of the figure when you decrease one dimension and increase the other dimension. The expression we created was a quadratic. (x -2) (x +2). We found that this equation, when expanded using the distributive property, is equivalent to x2 -4. We watched a very cheesy rap video on the F.O.I.L method, check it out for yourself. Cheesy F.O.I.L. Method Rap
Finally, using algebra tiles we used a hands-on approach to factoring binomials.
CMP7
We completed our last investigations in our unit “Stretching and Shrinking”, played jeopardy, reviewed our class record and completed the assessment. We are beginning our “Shrink it down and Blow it up” scaling project. Students have selected their images and project specifics have been added to Google Classroom.
Science 7th/8th
This week students completed their Alien World Project. During the week, they shared their ideas with each other and worked toward creating a scientifically accurate planet and alien species. On Friday, Gold Class presented to Blue and then Blue presented to Gold. There is a lot of creative science going on and many students have done extensive research on how different attributes such as low gravity, thin atmosphere and moons can cause interesting conditions on the planet.
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