Week of September 5th - 8th

TA’s Notes:

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

5th -8th Grade Curriculum Night and Learning Expo has been moved from Thursday, 9/28, to Wednesday, 9/27, 6:30pm

Williston FAP Annual Fund

Please donate to the FAP Annual Fund. This is how your student's field trips are paid for.

$45 recommended per student. Any amount helps!

Send check to Williston Central School, Williston FAP, 195 Central School Drive

Annual Fund Info

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

We introduced our first unit of the year - Peace One Day. We read a picture book and watched a short film on the creation of Peace One Day. Students reflected on the idea and brainstormed ideas of things that they could do to make peace on September 21.  Students also labeled and set up their Reading Response Notebook, Writer’s Notebook, and Humanities folder. These will be important learning tools for the school year. Chromebooks were also assigned to students.

Next week we will be learning about peacemakers and methods to deal with conflict. We will also have our first Reading Cafe on Monday. Students should bring in an independent reading book for the cafe. We will also have our first current events lesson and  start to set up our digital classrooms and digital learning tools.

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

Math ⅚: This week we engaged in the Week of Inspirational Math Lessons organized by Jo Boaler at Stanford University.  If you haven’t heard about her, she is an amazing mathematician who is really internationally known for her Growth Mindset work in Mathematics.  Each year she organizes a set of problems to introduce to students the first week of school and they are amazing.  Check her out if her work is of interest to you!  https://www.youcubed.org/

Lessons this week included:  

• Making 2 and 3 dimensional shapes with a loop of rope.  Students had to work in groups of 4, all have at least one hand on the rope and convince a teacher that they had the shape they were intending to build.  Required some review of the attributes of two and three D shapes!  https://bhi61nm2cr3mkdgk1dtaov18-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/6-8-WiM-3-Building-Shapes.pdf

• Building toothpick sequences and attempting to describe how many toothpicks were required without actually counting them.  It was a lesson in how to see patterns and then generalize them for future arrangements in the sequence.  https://bhi61nm2cr3mkdgk1dtaov18-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/6-8-WIM-3-Toothpick-Squares.pdf

• Cutting out shapes like triangles by folding and making one straight cut.  Students had the challenge of drawing shapes on a square piece of paper and then folding this shape, upon itself, so that they would only need one straight cut to cut out the shape.  It was really challenging, but it is totally possible!!!  https://bhi61nm2cr3mkdgk1dtaov18-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/6-8-WIM-3-One-Cut-Geometry.pdf

⅚ Science:

We began our week by launching the Food and Farming unit I have planned for the month.  Our first lesson, called from Field to Fork asked students to consider the differences between food items in my pantry.  Students had the challenge of figuring out what makes one potato different than the other or the differences between a tomato from Mazzas and a can of crushed tomatoes from California.  We started with just the information contained on the can or label and then I gave them additional info, like where the tomato was grown, or how it was grown.  Students then considered, how did this tomato get here?  We built food system models, tracing the food item from field to plate.  We considered who the players are in the journey: farmers, distributors, etc.  and also considered the inputs (seeds, fertilizers) and the outputs (money spent, gas emissions) that are also part of the journey of that food item.  This modelling helps students to see not just a tomato, but everything and everyone needed to get that tomato to our table! We will continue this work next week.  On Thursday, we will have a community lunch together at school.  No bagged lunches or school lunches will be necessary that day!  We will be feeding them!  

The Week in Mr. Roof’s Room (⅞ Humanities):

⅞ ELA

This week, we worked on completing a student interests document, so that we can all get to know each other better, and so that we can identify connections that bring us together. We also hope to use our interests in our learning. In addition, we worked on writing reflections about our amazing circus residency with Troy Wonderle. The objective was to identify the new learning we experienced from taking risks, pushing our comfort zones, and using teamwork, and then to examine how we can use that new learning in the classroom and beyond. We also introduced independent reading, with the goal being an hour of independent reading each day. We are flexible about this, as it is a lofty goal for many. The first step is to make a solid habit of reading both in school and out, and to track progress. We will support this by using a weekly reading log.

⅞ Social Studies

This week, we worked on completing individual SMART behavior matrices that pinpoint in-class behaviors that support us all in establishing a productive learning environment. Students had six columns of classroom situations to complete SMART targets for: Entering and Leaving the classroom; Working Independently; Working with others; Working on projects that require many materials; Listening to a peer, adult, or video present information; and Eating in the classroom.

We also set up and joined our google classroom.

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

CMP8 and CMP7

In both CMP7 and CMP8 we began our week with Jo Boaler’s Week of Inspiration Math (WIM).

Through videos, hands-on math activities and conversations students focused on math boosting messages, strategies for solving math problems, embracing math mistakes and realizing that doing math fast is not important, but deep thinking is.  We learned about Pi /and how it relates to circumference and diameter, we played with rope, created 3-D geometric figures and we used multiple strategies to find the area of different geometric figures.  Equal math talk during our dyad discussions was practiced. It was a fast and furious week! To find out more about WIM and the awesome Jo Boaler, you can peruse the Youcubed website.  https://www.youcubed.org/

Science 7th/8th

What does an effective, respectful and fun science class look like?  We spent some time setting norms for class behavior to begin our year, organized our science journals and placed tabs in our science binders.  We began our academic study with considering the physical characteristics of matter in the form of 13 duct taped vials with unknown contents.  Through sound, feel and touch, students had to describe the properties they observed and then conjecture on what materials were inside.  We also played the “Physical Properties of Matter Game” where students could only describe the physical attributes of an object, without describing how it is used, while their partner had to guess what the object was.  Personally, I was stumped by a tooth brush!  Finally, we took notes on some of the common physical properties of matter which are density, ductility, malleability, boiling point, melting point, electrical conduction and solubility. Next week we will begin with density!