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.***
Voyager Homework Club- Tuesdays (2:00-3:30pm) and Wednesdays (3:00-4:30pm)
Dates to Know:
- Nov 20th - 24th- No School, Thanksgiving Break- Good time for a back-pack cleanout!!
- Nov 27th - Dec 1st- Scholastic Book Fair at WCS. ⅚ students will attend the book fair on Tuesday, 11/28. Students should bring money on that day, if they would like to purchase a book at the fair.
- Wed, Dec 6th- Voyager Family Night / Variety Show 6:30 - 8:15pm at WCS in Dining Room & Auditorium
- Sat, Dec 9th- Voyager students can volunteer to be elves with the Polar Express from 4:00 - 8:00pm. Sign up link was sent to all students and can be accessed Here
Williston FAP News:
The Williston Families as Partners (FAP) is dedicated to ensuring that the children of Williston receive the best education possible. Strong schools and strong families combine to create a vibrant Williston community and help our children reach their full potential.
For a suggested donation amount of:
$30 per student in grades EEE-4 and/or
$45 per student in grades 5-8
Your contribution to the Williston Schools Annual Fund will ensure the continuation of important FAP programs that directly support and enhance the education of all of our children:
- equitable funding of field trips that extend the learning beyond the classroom;
- educational grants for classrooms to provide enhanced developmental opportunities for all students;
- new technology for classroom use;
- student services in the form of clothing, equipment and scholarships to camps for those most in need;
- speakers and workshops for parents;
- an inter-generational reading program;
- and teacher appreciation events
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
Highlights
- Played 5 Themes of Geography Team Jeopardy
- Students selected and started to research a country for our Google Slides project.
- Prepared for the National Geographic Bee using Kahoot games and Geo Bee quizzes.
- Completed final self assessment of our Reading Response Notebooks.
- Watched ‘He Named Me Malala’ as a follow up to the read aloud of the book.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: I owe you a deep and detailed explanation of the week, but I am pooped! The last 12 weeks have been busy in our 5th grade math class and I’m seeing a lot of growth! But...we could all use a break. Thank goodness we are about to have one!
Thanks to you all for helping with homework at home. I know it can be stressful. Please always know that it’s better to limit the frustrations and stress of homework. Just send those kiddos in with their best effort and this will be enough!
Highlights from this week include:
- Two different days of graphing science data. This is a valuable skill for math, but essential for science, because it helps us say something important about data. We have collected and graphed two sets of data: barometer data for daily ‘heights” of water and our straw markers AND data from our “Heating the Earth” investigation, where students looked at how the sun drives the weather by heating air in the atmosphere. I have attached a few photos of the graphs and a list of observations students made about the graphed data.
- Ah ha moments about ratio tables and their value to addition and subtraction of fraction problems. Students see that ratio tables allow us to find equivalent fractions for given fractions and then find common denominators for those given fractions.
Math 6: I owe you a deep and detailed explanation of the week, but I am pooped! The last 12 weeks have been busy in our 5th grade math class and I’m seeing a lot of growth! But...we could all use a break. Thank goodness we are about to have one!
Thanks to you all for helping with homework at home. I know it can be stressful. Please always know that it’s better to limit the frustrations and stress of homework. Just send those kiddos in with their best effort and this will be enough!
Highlights from the week include:
- We took a quiz on fraction addition and subtraction. Still some persistent misconceptions are present. Practice some at home!
- A discovery about fraction of problems...that these kinds of problems are really fraction multiplication problems and that fractions have a much easier strategy for solving. That is, multiplying numerators and denominators.
- We also discovered that improper fractions can be clunky to multiply. But that when we use an area model, the process for solving is much easier.
⅚ Science:
It was graphing galore week! We collected lots of mathematical data this week and used both math and science time to represent the story of our data sets in graphical form. Highlights from the week include:
- Reading more about air and weather
- Watching a few videos on air masses and fronts
- Recording data from our homemade barometers and graphing this data
- Graphing data about the uneven distribution of hot and cold air on Earth and how this drives our weather systems
Coming soon...magnets, electricity and electromagnets! Should be a great unit. Our resident engineer, Dan, will provide expertise, as an electrical engineer, of scientific discoveries and technologies that changed our world!
The Week in Mr. Roof’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
ELA: Greetings All, and Happy Thanksgiving! This week, we worked to complete a second written draft of our Turning Point narratives. Students have been busy peer editing and revising their writing. We are hoping to make these narratives examples of super strong writing. The assessed draft is now due on Dec 1, so two weeks left! We also continued practice with subject/verb agreement, making sure that all of our subjects and verbs agree in tense (past, present, or future) and number (singular or plural). Students are now on reading log 11 to accompany their independent reading. It is quite amazing the amount of literature that our students read so far this year. They are an impressive bunch. Ask them about their favorite book so far.
Social Studies: In preparation for the National Geographic School Bee 2018, we practiced geography skills using an online location site, and Kahoots, which is a class quiz in a competition format. This will help us to determine a Voyager Geography master, who will go on to compete against other WCS teams. In addition as usual, we worked on summary and current events with CNN 10.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
We began this week with looking back at our “Thinking with Mathematical Models”. In our summative assessment many students performed well on some learning targets but then missed some important parts of another. As a class we honed in on two learning targets; multi-steps equations and creating equations for linear models. We discussed strategies and practiced and then the retake was given.
In the middle of the week students began grappling with exponential graphs, tables and equations. We looked at an amoeba dividing every 30 minutes and graphed how many amoeba we would have after 8 hours. We found our growth factor, y-intercept, and created an equation that looks like: y= a(b)x The “a” is the initial value or y-intercept, the “b” is the growth factor, the “x” is the independent variable (time) and the “y” is the total amount of amoeba. We ended the week with some practice on exponents and scientific notation and a few math card games.
CMP7
We were in to chips this week and I am not talking about sour cream and onion! When working with positive and negative integers we utilize black and red chips as positive and negative integers. We learned different strategies for adding and subtracting integers.
We finished the week with pulling out our “Shapes and Designs” Unit Tests and redoing some of our errors. The two areas that we worked on was finding the sum of the internal and external angle of a polygon and construction of various geometric figures. We conferred, discussed and practiced a variety of questions and ended with a brief retake.
On Friday we practiced our chip skill and had the chance to play a few math card games.
Science 7th/8th
The last two weeks we have been feverishly finishing our chemistry unit. Last week we looked at pH and used cabbage juice as an indicator to find out how acidic or basic some common liquids are. We learned what it means to be acidic or basic, and how acids and bases react with each other. As we began this week, we explored acid rain, its causes and how it can impact the ecosystem. We read some information of how Vermont is handling this issue.
At the end of the week we completed our Chemistry Unit with a summative assessment. Students had access to their journals, Periodic Tables and class records. They worked hard to show what they know. When we return from our break we will be moving on!
