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:
- Fri, Nov 10th- School Dance for 6th - 8th graders (Hosted by Harbor House)
- Nov 20th - 24th- No School, Thanksgiving Break
- Nov 27th - Dec 1st- Scholastic Book Fair at WCS
- Wed, Dec 6th (Slight time change with this event!)- 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. More info to come. Please note the date if your student might be interested!
Thanksgiving Baskets
Voyager House has a tradition where each core collects donations to assemble a Thanksgiving Basket to donate to a local Williston family in need. Students talked about what should be in this basket and who wanted to bring in what. Lists from each core will be emailed out asap. Donations are requested by next Wednesday, 11/15.
Thank you for anything you can contribute!
For 8th grade families:
Permission Forms for the May 24th - May 25th 8th Grade Celebration Trip to Ridin-Hy. All forms must be completed and returned by December 15th so WCS can reserve enough beds at the ranch. Students were also given paper copies of these forms. Please return to Voyager TA.
Flashlight Drive for Puerto Rico at WCS
Ever since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, over 80% of public schools in Puerto Rico have been closed, and still are! Tanner Wolpert and Asa Roberts are working with former Swift student Storm Rushford's and his family, to send flashlights to help these schools. Our goal is to send more than 450 flashlights by Friday, November 17th. These flashlights will help a school without power by bringing enough light for students to read and write as soon as they can. The types of flashlights we are looking for are relatively cheap and light, and suitable for moving around the school. Please drop off your flashlight donations in the box outside of the front office at WCS!
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
Highlights:
- Finished our Mystery and Spook unit. Students learned the LEAF format for writing a constructed response. We searched for evidence in the mystery/spook book that shows how the setting creates a story of mystery and spook and then used that evidence to write a LEAF paragraph.
- Completed our survey of the 5 Themes of Geography. Students prepared flashcards for a landforms vocabulary activity and searched a physical world map for landforms and bodies of water. We also learned about regions and identified the unique qualities that can make up a region.
- 6th graders wrote their second friendly letter to a pen pal in Hawaii and 5th graders started their first letter to a pen pal in Gambia.
WCS FAP Book Fair - Week of November 27th
Voyager 5th graders will visit the book fair at 8:15 on Tuesday, November 28th
Voyager 6th graders will visit the book fair at 9:15 on Tuesday, November, 28th
If you would like your student to purchase a book, please send your student to school with money on 11/28. I will also have an online wish list for classroom books, if you would like to support our classroom library by purchasing a book from the fair.
Enrichment opportunity: The American Mothers National 5th Grade Essay Contest is open to all 5th grade students. There are monetary prizes available to the winners of each state, as well as a national winner who will read their speech at the annual American Mothers' Conference in Washington, DC. Deadline: January 15th, 2018
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: It’s been a ‘big shift’ week for students. As we have moved away from models for addition and subtraction of fractions (in clocks and money), I can already see some growing strategies for finding a common denominator!
We focused our learning on two problems, the River Trail Mapping Project and the Mr. Miles problems. The first problem asked students to mark landmarks on a trail that was 30 km long. This was helpful to see how students were using their understanding of fractions of a whole to mark certain locations. We called this model a double number line. We then took this idea and applied it to the Mr. Miles problems where students got to choose the length of the trail, based on some noticings about common denominators. The goal of both activities was to start to use a common denominator to add and subtract fractions.
We also worked with ratio tables to discuss problems that ask, “Which is the better buy?” We worked with problems like, 5 granola bars for $8 or 6 granola bars for $9 to find the better buy. Ironically, students believed that both deals were equally good deals which allowed us to then explore justifications for this.
Math 6: Students are fully immersed in fractions! We spent our week reviewing the addition and subtraction algorithm for fractions and did a bit of practice on it! In addition, we began investigating models that explain how to find a fraction of a fraction, and looking at limitations of these models. We built a few public records to discuss noticings and limitations and used some modeling tools, the fraction multipliers, to see how these fraction of number problems can be modeled. See photo of public record below. We are coming up on a quiz next week to assess addition and subtraction of fractions. I gave students 30 problems to do for homework and the average was a 66%, so if you can, give them some problems to solve at home this weekend!
⅚ Science: This week, we paused on the introduction of phenomena and sunk into what we know about air. Students were introduced to a framework last week, where I asked them to consider what happened and why it happened?, in order to make claims about air. I have attached some examples so you can see what students were documenting. We also began intensively studying new vocabulary from the unit and reading about air as it relates to weather. I often give vocabulary and reading at the end of a unit and students articulated my reasoning for this - “because we already know the words and have seen them in action!” This is a way to let students build language along the way, and background knowledge, so that they can indeed connect with words and text and remember words and concepts for the future.
We also built two weather instruments, an aneroid barometer and a water barometer, both designed to measure air pressure. We have learned that air pressure is one factor that influences weather. Students will keep data over the next few weeks to see if there are patterns and trends in their readings, and then compare those trends with barometric readings from BIA. They can also compare sensitivities of designs, to see which is a better measure of the changes in air pressure, a barometer made with water or one made with air.
We had a modeling and vocabulary quiz today. I’ll have those scored and reported on Jumprope soon!
The Week in Mr. Roof’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
ELA 7&8
This week, our reading logs and narrative outlines were due on Monday. We began reading log 10 (due Monday), with a focus on subject/verb agreement and figurative language. In class, we used the week to turn our narrative outlines into a completed draft. This takes a lot of hard work The assessed draft is due next Friday, November 17th. We are focused on writing stories that have all of the elements of plot, in addition to excellent use of figurative language, descriptive language, and sensory details. We also worked on our understanding of subject/verb agreement by completing some online exercises in addition to class handouts. We scored and discussed the handout as a class.
Social Studies
This week, we continued our practice of summary writing and use of text evidence to support claims. We practiced our understanding and familiarity with world cultures and religions vocabulary. We also finished our preliminary work with the five themes of geography. This sets us up nicely for our in depth study of world cultures and religion, in which students will pick a world region to research, using the five themes as a guide.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week students have been exploring exponential functions through tables, graphs and equations. We began to consider the exponential growth equation y= a(bx), where a is the y-intercept, b is the growth factor and x is the independent variable. All of the parts of the equation can be seen in the table and graph as “landmarks”. We explored how the growth factor changes the shape of the exponential curve. We practiced problems with exponents and writing numbers in scientific notation.
CMP7
The 7th graders began working with positive and negative integers. We worked with number lines to add and subtract numbers. These models help us to visualize our operations.
We learned about Spearfish, SD where on January 23, 1943 the temperature increased from -4 degrees to 45 degrees in two minutes. It was a world record change. Using temperature to understand adding and subtracting positive and negative integers is one way of using number lines.
Science 7th/8th
This week we have been very busy- more info in next week’s Voice!
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