Week of December 11th - 15th

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:

• Wed, Dec 20th- 5th- 8th Grade Concerts

• December 25th - January 2nd: No School (School resumes Wed, Jan 3rd)

Williston Central School is in need of volunteers!
Friday, Dec 22nd morning, we need a few parents to help get our Cinema Day ready for the students!
Please contact Jackie Parks at JParks@cvsdvt.org or 871-6103 if you are available to help pop popcorn anytime between the hours of 8:00am - 1:00pm.  Thank you!!

Looking for gift ideas for your student?  Think PENCILS!!  Voyager students seem to be eating pencils these days and we are running low!

 

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

Highlights:

• Voyager just kicked off a 5-8 interdisciplinary one act playwriting unit. Students will work in groups to write, produce, direct, and perform a one act play. The 4 one acts will be performed in late January.

• Students are also preparing for an International Day celebration. Performances include dance, songs, and fashion show. We will also have a taste fest, International museum, game, and craft rooms. Our International Day celebration will take place on Friday, December 22nd during the school day. We ask students to plan their food, performance, or activity well ahead of time!  We thank you in advance for your support on this project and will happily help students prepare here at school if needed. Students can access this assignment on Google Classroom.

• Our National Geographic Bee competition started on Friday. We completed the first three rounds and will complete the last 4 rounds next week. The winner will move on to the school finals!

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

Math 5:

Highlights from the week include:  

• Modeling decimal addition and subtraction and revising our thinking on trading (trading a tenth for 10 hundredths).
• Evaluating why the traditional algorithm works for adding and subtracting whole numbers (and how trading in base ten pieces is the same as borrowing) and then seeing that this same method works for decimals as long as you use the decimal point to align place value.
• Comparing decimals by focusing in on how many of each place value we have.
• Writing decimals without using the word point and writing numbers from words that represent a number.

Math 6:  

Highlights from the week include:

• Coming to agreement on the division algorithms for fractions.
• Deciding which operation would be necessary to solve a fraction word problem.
• Practicing the development of fact families, so that we can solve problems that have an unknown value (variable) in the expression.
• Creating our own review sheet for the Unit Assessment on Monday.
• A Flip Quiz Jeopardy Game to practice the skills in Let’s Be Rational.

⅚ Science:

Highlights from the week include:

• Learning about Phenomena of the 19th Century:  Orsted and Ampere both made discoveries about electric current long before lightbulbs, telephones, and motors.  These discoveries were instrumental in creating useful things to do necessary jobs.  Learning from their perspective helps us to see how a simple discovery blew open the industrial revolution.
• Discovering that current (flowing electrons) makes a circuit magnetic.  Evidence:  a compass needle moves when placed under a wire in a closed circuit.
• Creating electromagnets and determining that coiled wire makes an electromagnet stronger.  Evidence:  when we coil more wire, we can pick up more paperclips.
• Determining that more volts also makes a stronger electromagnet.  Evidence:  a 12 V battery picked up more paperclips (with 45 coils) than a 6 V did with the same coils.

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

ELA: We continued our independent reading with reading log 14. The focus this week is on conflict, both internal and external. In class, we read the holiday season classic A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, adapted by Frederick Gaines. This is to help us learn about the major components of drama, and to practice for our Voyager one acts. Students took turns reading the script aloud, and noting differences between drama writing and literature.  Students also worked on their spelling, grammar, and punctuation skills by completing 30 minutes of IXL.

Social Studies: This week, we prepared for our Voyager International Festival, which will take place in the morning on Friday, 12/22. Students are able to choose from a variety of products/performances to share, and can be in groups or solo. Students are conducting research regarding food, music/dance, games, arts/crafts, and/or artifacts, and then present their findings and products at our festival. It should be exciting and fun. This is an extension of our World Cultures Research project, which is moving along. Students have selected a region or country of the world to study in-depth, and are conducting research on all of the factors and components of the five themes of geography. One of the important skills we are working on is citing sources. This ensures that we give credit to those who have created what we use. As usual, we also watched CNN 10, and worked on summarizing, including text evidence.

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

CMP8

We began the week with completing our GGG assessment.  We started our “Looking For Pythagoras” with vocabulary and  review of square roots and perfect squares.  We tried our hands at finding the area of irregular figures on dot matrix paper and discussed strategies to solve these types of problems.

We then began looking  where a square root lies on a number line.  We utilized perfect squares such as 4, 9 to find the 5.  This we did without use of a calculator.  All of these skills will help us to understand the Pythagorean Theroeom.

CMP7

At the start of the week, students completed their “Accentuate the Negative” Unit test and explored vocabulary for our new unit, “Stretching and Shrinking”.  Along the way we reviewed the steps you take to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions. We explored a problem that had us decide the height of the Statue of Liberty with just two measures given; the tablet and the width of the arm.  Students were focused and showed some wonderful problem solving strategies.  We then moved onto finding the height of the mystery teacher in a picture based on a single clue.  Students used a variety of techniques and shared their thinking with class.  Finally, we ended the week with using some hight tech rubber band devices to enlarge pictures.  We discussed how figures are similar and what that means in relation to side lengths and angles.

Science 7th/8th

The week began with students selecting a genetic disease.  They learned about the how the disease is trasmitted genetically, how it impacts on the body, what population the disease is typically found, treatments and other interesting facts.  Students could create an accessible brochure or poster.  Researching the gene location of the disease  allowed students to draw a model of the chromosome.  Students will present their diseases next week.