TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
***Please notify us if your child has strep. Thank you for this courtesy.***
Dates to Know:
- Fri, Oct 20th- No School Parent/Teacher/Student conferences this day
- Fri, Oct 27th- PLP Cafe Open House (formerly called the Harvest Breakfast) 7:45 - 8:45am in Voyager House. Come interact with Voyager students and engage them in conversations about their Personalized Learning Plans (PLP’s).
- Fri, Nov 3rd- School Dance for 6th - 8th graders (Hosted by Harbor House)
- Wed, Dec 6th- Voyager Family Night / Variety Show 6 - 8pm at WCS in Dining Room & Auditorium
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
See Voyager Houses Annual Fund Progress so far: Voyager's Annual Fund Progress
Order your Yearbook!
PLP CAFE and OPEN HOUSE!!!!
WE NEED YOU! COME HELP US PROMOTE THE PERSONALIZED LEARNING PROCESS!
(Information from Ms. Sherman)
Voyager will be hosting a PLP cafe/open house. Come join us in talking with students about their Personal Learning Plans, looking at their sites, and enjoying some coffee and a tasty treat. Throughout the beginning of the school year, students have been working on their PLP sites; creating goals, writing reflections, and documenting their learning. Students create goals for themselves and work with others to achieve their goals. Below is the information for the morning.
NOTE
Students should come at 7:45 if possible. Bus riding students should come straight to Voyager house on the 27th and get their PLP sites up, first thing, to share out.
What: PLP Cafe and Open House (To explore student learning through their google sites for PLP’s)
When: October 27th, 2017
Time: 7:45-8:45
Where: Voyager House
Parent Expectations: Come ready to ask a few students questions about their goals and give them feedback about their process, and enjoy a bit of social time with our Voyager Community.
Student Expectations: Come ready to share out your PLP with your parents and other adults.
Williston Families,
Save the date: The FAP Craft Show takes place on Saturday, November 4th, from 9:30 am – 4:00 pm at Williston Central School. There are over 100 crafters, artists and specialty food vendors participating. You'll find lots of amazing handicrafts, toys, artwork, jewelry, decorative items and yummy foods all made by talented crafters and artists. Whether you want to shop or not, we need YOU! This is one of the biggest Families as Partners fundraisers, and the proceeds from the show help fund events, activities and grants that benefit all students in the Williston schools. Please share some of your time and volunteer for a shift to set up (Friday afternoon, Nov 3) or during the show on Saturday. The sign-up link is here:http://signup.com/go/tEwkhqs (You will need to enter your email address to sign up for a shift but will not need to set up an account with Sign-up.com).
Thank you!
Karen Olson & Paula LeBlanc
wsdcraftshow@cvsdvt.org
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
- 5th graders started reading Closed for the Season by Mary Downing Hahn and
6th graders started reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Our mystery and spook literature session will run until November 3rd.
- We kicked off our Geography unit with a big lesson on the 5 Themes of Geography.
- We are wrapping up our Malala argument writing this week and students are eager to take some action to support Malala’s campaign - see below.
After reading ‘I Am Malala’ we will be doing a classwide clothing drive to help support Malala’s Fund. Most of the proceeds after shipping costs go to the Malala Fund to support girls’ education projects in vulnerable communities around the world. Your student may bring in gently used and clean clothing of any size, to be sent to Schoola’s Malalafund clothing drive and fundraiser to stand #withMalala. We will collect clothes until Wednesday, November 1st. Thanks!
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: We wrapped up Unit 1 this week, with some review and the Post Assessment. Scores will be posted after corrections are made on Monday. We began our new Fractions unit on Thursday with discussions about Greatest Common Factor and Least Common Multiple.
Open Math Classroom: Thursday, November 2 9:30-10:30! Come join the learning if you like!
Math 6: We made great strides this week in understanding decimal names for fractions, specifically working on long division for those fractions that cannot be easily named as 10ths and 100ths. This is always a tricky moment because long division is already a tough skill, but then to go right into the decimal place values makes it even harder. The strategy is still the same, so it fits right into the goals for division of all numbers. We will finish the unit working on percents and take our final assessment next week.
Open Math Classroom: Thursday, November 2 8:30-9:30! Come join the learning if you like!
⅚ Science: We had a productive editing day for our infographic project, and it was great to see students take their own and others’ feedback and make good use of it. I will be assessing those this weekend. You should also ask your child to see the infographic they made. They are quite good!
Try it this weekend! You know you want to!
- Place an empty plastic water bottle in the freezer. Cap on please! What happens?
- Try to explain how the vacuum cleaner works! Vacuum the house for your family!
- Since air puppies cannot suck or pull, then how does a straw work? Grab a milkshake and have a lively discussion!
- Can you figure these phenomena out? Air is the key!
We also continued work on our new unit, Air, Water and Weather. Students experienced two new phenomena, air in a soccer ball and the peppermint oil investigation. Both demonstrations had purpose. Driving questions this week were: What will happen when I put 10 pumps of air into a soccer ball and why does that happen? What will happen when I put peppermint oil on a paper plate and why will that happen? Both driving questions seem pretty light on the learning, but ironically, there are many deep questions that can be asked and misconceptions that must be mythbusted! Students learned that air is something, that it has weight. After pumping air in, we could measure the change in mass on the scale. Some students believe the ball would get lighter, because of the misconceptions about helium - more air makes it lighter. We discussed why some might think the ball’s weight wouldn’t change - air is nothing. So, the myth was busted! Also, the question of how we smell things, isn’t one we think of often. It really makes us think, what is in a slice of air? We demonstrated that it took some time for the scent to travel to the students in the back. Some never smelled it. I asked, how did you smell the peppermint? Claims were made that air moves. This behavior becomes very important in explaining many things. We then watched a teacher model the air puppies theory. He related air to newborn pups, in the way it behaves. It just bumbles around. This model helped us to see that air puppies/particles/molecules have forces when they bumble around and that those forces can make things move. All three learning experiences are going to help us explain the crushed water bottle phenomenon and the tanker car implosion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM
Left: Learning modeling by viewing a model of the soccer ball phenomenon.
Right: Our Driving Questions board for each new phenomena we experience.
An updated student model of the crushed water bottle.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week the 8th graders have been working with the distributive property, solving multi-step algebraic equations and finding the Line of Best Fit. On Wednesday, students took a Partner Quiz which was the first formal assessment of this term.
CMP7
At the beginning of the week students took a brief Shapes and Designs Check-up. Students will have the results of their check-up in their binder. We then shifted our geometry study to triangles and quadrilaterals. Using plastic “polystrips” students constructed triangles out of a variety of side lengths. Some of these side lengths worked and some did not. We began to see a rule that governs which side lengths will make a triangle. Does the same rule apply to quadrilaterals? Using our “polystrips” we created quadrilaterals that worked and found those that did not. Students shared their findings, looked for patterns and came up with conjectures based on their evidence.
Science 7th/8th
We began the week with looking at atoms, molecules, elements and compounds. We used simplified models to create these structures and classified them. Tuesday and Wednesday we experimented with chemical reactions and observed what qualifies as a chemical reaction. We saw bubbles forming, color change, temperature change and heard fizzing. We then created claim and evidence statements about how we could tell that a reaction was taking place.
Our Periodic Table of Elements:
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