TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students*
VOYAGER RECYCLE SALE
ALL Voyager Parents -- Sign Up HERE!
The Voyager Recycle Sale is Saturday, April 1st! This is our one big fundraiser to send all Voyager students on an overnight at Camp Abnaki.
Our goal is for every family to donate at least item of quality to this fundraiser. (Drop-offs prior to 3/31 can be arranged if needed)
All items can be dropped off at WCS on Friday, March 31st between 6 and 8 pm. The sale is Saturday, April 1st, 9:00 am - 2:00 pm.
Save the date and volunteer for a shift. We need lots of help from Voyager students and families to make this a success! Help is needed setting up on Friday evening, we have 2-hour shifts on Saturday throughout the sale and baked goods & drinks are needed for students to sell as concessions. Lots of great opportunities to help out!
If you are new to Voyager (parents of 5th graders) please make an effort to join us, this is a wonderful, community-building event and everyone has a blast. It draws a huge shopping crowd and has become a Williston tradition. It is a great way to clean out and recycle your unwanted items and find new treasures!!!
⅞ INFO:
7th & 8th graders will start taking the SBAC’s (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) starting Monday, March 20th and this will continue throughout the week. Please make sure students get plenty of sleep, eat a healthy breakfast and come to school ready to give it their all!
⅞ Conference Schedules:
The FAP Big Basket Raffle!
Collections for the 17th Annual Big Basket Raffle and Silent Auction are underway! This is one of FAP’s biggest fundraisers of the year, with proceeds funding FAP programs that support all WCS and ABS students, families and staff. Items donated by our Williston School District families will be made into beautiful themed baskets that will be raffled off at the BIG BASKET RAFFLE on Saturday, March 25th , 2017.
Mr. Merrill- Dog Days
Ms. O’Brien- On the Water
Mr. Godfrey- Gift Cards Galore
Ms. Quatt- Java Lover
Students will have the opportunity to enter individual raffles for a chance to win a special activity or experience with staff from both buildings to help raise money for FAP grants, field trips, etc. We have over 25 opportunities, with over 100 winners total, between ABS and WCS!
- Tickets will be sold the week of March 13 – 17th at each school
- Drawing on Friday, March 17th and winners notified Monday, March 20th
Each student will get one free ticket and additional tickets will be sold for 25 cents each (suggest limit of $5). During the week of March 13-17th students at ABS can purchase tickets outside the gym between 7:45am and 8:30am and at WCS during lunches. The winners will be chosen on Friday the 17th.
** Click HERE to sign-up to help sell tickets mornings at ABS **
Contact Shani Varricchione/FAP with questions
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week we kicked off our US history unit with a study of three countries (Spain, Britain, and France) that played a big role in the race to establish colonies and control of North America. Students participated in a play about the Jamestown colony, a role play of first contact between the French explorers and Algonquins, and a reenactment of the battle between Samuel de Champlain and the Iroquois. This battle set the stage for the next 150 years, with the Iroquois siding with the British and Algonquins with the French and culminated with the French and Indian War ending in 1763. This is important background information for the focus of our unit - the Revolutionary War.
Here are links to short videos of the reenactments.
We also introduced our literature group book - My Brother Sam is Dead. A nice summary of the book can be found below.
This young adult novel, which successfully captures the pain of the Revolutionary War, is a fine example of historical fiction. The American Revolution was a war that divided families (English loyalists versus eager Patriots) and one of the families being torn apart is the Meeker family. Young Tim sees his 16-year-old brother join the militia to fight the British, while his father tries to remain loyal to the crown. Their hometown of Redding Ridge, Connecticut is a Tory town, and it is a constant struggle for the family to remain neutral. As the war progresses, Tim has to learn some very hard lessons: Life does not always follow the easiest and happiest course. Readers will be drawn in by compelling characters, and also by the novel's well-crafted historical backdrop. The Collier brothers have written a story that reaches across historical boundaries, and has become a modern-day classic.
Scholastic.com
My intern, David Maika will be taking over the class for the next two plus weeks to teach his solo unit on the Revolutionary War.
Dear Voyager House Parents,
My name is David Maika. I am Aron Merrill's student intern for the 2016-17 school year. I've been working with the 5th and 6th graders from the very beginning of the school year and have loved every minute of it! Starting on March 13 I will be doing my 2 weeks of solo teaching. I am in UVM's Middle Level MAT program and specialize in Social Studies. I will be teaching the 5th and 6th graders about the American Revolution.
The first week of the unit will provide students with the background and causes of the Revolution. The second week we will be conducting a 5 day simulation of the Revolutionary War. Students will create a character that they take through the simulation and will be keeping a journal where they write about their character's experiences. At the end of the unit students will use their journals to turn what they've learned into a narrative piece about their character. By the end of the unit students will know the causes of the American Revolution, the major events of the Revolutionary War, and will understand why Americans fought for their independence and what the human cost of the war was.
I am very excited to begin my solo teaching and look forward to being in front of the class every day! If you have any questions for me please feel free to contact me. My e-mail is dmaika@cssu.org I check it frequently!
Thank you,
David Maika
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: This week we began a new unit in Geometry. I heard a lot of “YES” exclamations and so I better get this right! We spent our week keeping track of new vocabulary that we are learning in this content area, because there is so much. Ask your Voyager about coordinate points, coordinate grids, looping, linear relationships, x and y coordinates, and lines, segments, points, and rays. There is a lot to learn. This unit will involve a project so be on the lookout next week for a project summary and plan. Our focus this week was on naming points in space, specifically using an x and y coordinate name (x,y). Students had lots of practice plotting points. We also spent most of our exploration time later in the week on growing cube sequences. Students were building arrangements, predicting future arrangement patterns, and then graphing the pattern in order to say something about how it is growing or changing over time. Bridges takes the extra step to graph these patterns, an excellent precursor to higher level algebra. There are lots of stretch opportunities in this work for kids on both ends of the spectrum of comfort with geometry.
Math 6: We spent 4 days on one concept this week and it was time well spent. The kids kept asking me why it was Decimal Ops 2.3 Day Two and then Day Three! I spent extra time on multiplication of decimals! I think it was worth it! Although photos that I send home may be hard to understand, the ideas that students are generating in class are truly deep! The public record below demonstrates just how versatile students are when looking at decimal multiplication. This work has required some solid whole number multiplication and division, so it has given us another opportunity to practice these operations with whole numbers. We began decimal division today, Friday, and will assume a few days of work with this next week.
⅚ Science: Science has been very dynamic this week! Students reviewed concepts of gravity on Earth early this week and are working to generalize to explain how gravity might affect objects in space. Specifically the goal this week has been around modeling observable phenomena. We tackled the day night model, which drew a lot of ahh’s as students tried to figure out how the Earth moves to get the sun to “rise” in the East. We must be rotating counterclockwise for this to happen! You may notice that your child has an E and W on their hands. They were helpful in modeling this for the group! Long block this week was a big class with lots of group discussion and modeling with moons on skewers!
Photos below.
The Week in Mr. G’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
This week in 7/8 Humanities we have been studying the causes of WWI. Students are working on presenting their ideas using graphs, maps, and visual images, creating infographics of the war.
The Stock Market Game continues. This week students have been reflecting on the collaborative process and assessing themselves for their group work. Friday students present their first Stock Report to the class.
The Observer has put out a call for student work and several Voyager students have submitted poems, art, and other pieces for publication.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week we began each math session with SBAC questions. We analyzed what was being asked, discerned what answers were clearly wrong and looked for the best possible answers. As the week went on we looked at tables, graphs and equations and decided what type of function they represented. We established our class records for all the things we have learned about quadratic functions and reviewed graph and table landmarks. We took a pause from our work to discuss our class culture and how we could improve our communication and focus. We explored quadratic equations that have coefficients greater than 1 and how to factor those types of functions. We ended the week with a practice partner quiz. Next week we will have the “real” thing and will complete our investigation looking at projectiles.
CMP7
Part-to-part and part-to-whole proportions were a major focus for the week. We looked at proportions in recipes, reviewed percentages, multiplication and division of fractions and figured out how to find an unknown “x” in a proportion. At the end of the week students took a Check-up for the first investigation. We began each class this week preparing for our SBAC testing by reviewing questions. We reviewed how to eliminate answers and hone in on the best response.
Science 7th/8th
We began our new unit this week by discussing what it means to be “alive”. We categorized different items by living (biotic) or non-living (abiotic) We had a few sticky “wickets” such as eggs, seeds and viruses. We had a reading, vocabulary and discussion about the characteristics of life. During our long block class we performed a lab experiment with yeast. We tested different levels of sugar, yeast or warm water to see what condition would allow for optimal growth of our yeast organisms.
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