TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Don’t forget that conferences are coming up for many families and that students should attend his/her conference!
Voyager Recycle Sale!
We are in need of more parent volunteers! Students will help a lot but we also need parents to be there for pricing and organizing. This is our one big fundraiser for the year and we really need support!
We need items donated Friday night and volunteers for both days still. Please consider this fun event which supports all Voyager students!
Voyager Spark students at 3D VT Competition in Randolph, VT
And the group took home 2nd place!!!
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week students have been wrapping up the first half of Mr. Maika’s American Revolution Unit. We have been learning about some of the causes of Colonial discontent and displeasure with the British. We are very close to the outbreak of War!
To finish the week students have been working on creating a character that they will roleplay through 5 days of simulation starting on Thursday 3/23. Their characters are colonists living in Lexington, MA in 1775. So far students have been very creative with their character backgrounds and have embraced the opportunity to take on a new identity!
To chronicle the events of the simulations students will have created a journal for their character where they will write down their feelings and experiences. At the end of unit they will be using their journal to craft a narrative writing piece that will tell the story of their character!
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Students began work on the properties of quadrilaterals and how they can be classified. This classification process relies heavily on geometry language and so there was a lot of cross referencing our Math Antics videos where we collect geometry terms. We solved riddles about geometric shapes and made our own, in order to practice using the attribute and name of geometric shapes language. Today, I introduced the artist Paul Klee, whose work with geometric shapes made him famous. Students are creating a cityscape, in which they use geometric shapes to create city architecture. And as a bonus, they will include their favorite moon phase from our science unit to create a night scene! Thanks to Liz Demas, our art teacher, for helping with materials and acting as a consult!
Math 6: Some weeks I find that one lesson becomes 4! This was one of those weeks, where the complexity of the task, relied on a lot of prior knowledge and proficiency to meet the goal. The topic was percents and the context was which is the better buy. Students have seen these kinds of problems before with ratios and percent bars with fractional pieces. But these problems were particularly challenging for students and so we spent the extra time. It was time well spent! I think that students are learning how to reason on their own, draw on prior knowledge, and consider recent learning to figure out the math. I have chosen to do a lot of brain exercise in this unit anyway, encouraging long division, where others might just say, well use a calculator. I have done this because I think it has been good brain work. So many kids have felt the learning curve, struggling and struggling and then having a breakthrough, and this has been awesome to see! Decimal ops will wrap up soon, and then we dive deep into an algebra unit, Variables and Patterns.
⅚ Science: We have finally wrapped up the Solar System unit. It went on and on! A choice I made given the awesome math connections worth elaborating on! Students worked on relative size this week, remodeling how to make balls of different sizes “appear” to be the same size, graphing this data, making predictions about other ball sizes by using the graph, and then using their eye to check whether the trends in the data held true. Students learned that a ball that is 2x bigger than another ball, must be twice as far. This mathematical work was designed to explain two phenomena, why the sun and moon appear to be the same size, and why our star, the Sun, is so much brighter than other stars in the sky! On to Properties of Matter starting Monday!
The Week in Mr. G’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
Students in both grades applied themselves to SBAC testing this week. Completing nearly three full days of continuous testing takes a great deal of discipline and perseverance and Voyager students comported themselves admirably. On Thursday and Friday, we had some time to make up work that we missed with last week’s snow days. Students are completing an infographic to explain a cause or important feature of WWI. Next week we will be beginning a WWI simulation activity to help us understand how alliances, geography, and new technologies influenced the outcome of the Great War.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week the students completed their SBAC testing. They worked hard and persevered through some rigorous problems. We finished the week with reviewing how to find a quadratic equation from a table and continued work on our partner quiz.. There was no IXL skill work this week.
CMP7
Our 7th graders toiled long and hard on their SBAC tests. We began a survey project at the end of the week. In this project students will write a relevant survey question, collect data, analyze it, and create graphical representations. Students will write a conclusion based on their data which includes ratios, percentages, and measures of central tendency of a sample group. There was no IXL skill work this week.
Science 7th/8th
This was a very abridged week due to SBAC testing. Students completed their reading and responses on photosynthesis and cellular respiration. We reviewed the similarities and differences between plant and animal cells, and talked about what seeds need to grow and flourish. We began a seedling experiment in a closed system to conjecture whether plants would grow and the mass would change over time. Next week we will be back to a regular schedule.
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