Friday, January 26, 2018

PLAY WEEK!!!

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)


To 8th Grade Parents:
CHAMPLAIN VALLEY UNION HIGH SCHOOL

AN INVITATION
To 8th Grade Parents and Students of the Class of 2022
8th Grade Student & Parent Night
Champlain Valley Union High School
CVU Gym, Thursday, Feb. 8th 6:30 - 8:00pm
This evening will provide you and your son/daughter an introduction to the
Academic and elective programs they will experience in 9th grade.

PLAY WEEK!!!!










Week of January 22-26

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Week of January 16th - 19th

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)

Voyager One Act Plays
Evening Performances, Thursday, January 25th

Students performing in the first two plays should arrive at 6:30pm for 
their performance.
Students in the second two plays should arrive by 7:15pm.

Play Performance Times
Camzil 7:00 - 7:20pm
Grecia  7:25 - 7:45pm
Intermission 7:45 - 7:55pm
Ethopan 7:55 - 8:15pm
Fijiland 8:20 - 8:40pm
(Your student will know the name of their group, and be able to give you an 
explanation about the name!)

School Yearbooks!  February 23rd is last day to order.  
If you need a paper order form please let Katie 
Fieldsend know and she will send one home with 
your student.

Marko The Magician is coming to Williston Central School again this winter for an 
exciting evening of laughs and  fun.  This is a great family activity, or drop off your older 
middle school students for a few hours. All proceeds benefit the New York City field trip 
May 29-June 1, which includes students grades 5-8.  

When: Friday, February 9th
Time: 6:30 pm-8:30 pm
Where: Williston Central School Auditorium
Cost: $8.00/ticket
​​​​​​​​
The New York City students appreciate your support!

Notes from Ms. Sherman: 
Voyager Dance and Activity Night!!!
It's coming fast…..February is right around the corner!!!
We need your help!
Please chaperone, donate supplies, and/or donate concessions
(sign-up has been shared with you by email using Sign Up Genius.)
Questions- Email or Call Katie and thank you in advance

The Williston Community Peace Project and Williston Central School are collaborating to engage students and 
community members across generations. We are looking for a yoga instructor who is willing to volunteer to 
teach our 8th graders some basic yoga, with the hope that they could then teach younger and/or older 
members of our community. Please contact Aron Merrill - amerrill@cvsdvt.org

The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week we have focused on our play unit. Teams are now adding technical and performance elements to their 
plays and are working towards full dress and tech rehearsals. 5/6 students are also working on a few play based 
assignments. The goal is to be sure every student knows the script, basic stage directions, and reflects on his/her 
contributions to the success of the performance.

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

Math 5:  This week we did a final review on the work in Unit 3 which included understanding of 
decimals, addition and subtraction of decimals, and division.  Students have done very well on some 
of the targets that have been traditionally been sticking points for 5th graders.  I will have this 
assessment scored by Monday and students will then bring all Unit 3 work home for you to see.  We 
are moving onto standard algorithm for multiplication and division.  This will be a shorter unit so we 
can spend some solid time on geometry.  

Math 6:  Students have been tackling some significant misconceptions in geometry and more 
importantly building understandings of things that might always be true.  When students generalization 
in geometry, they find things that are true, if say, the triangle you are working with is a right triangle.  If a 
triangle isn’t right, then another strategy might be better. We have worked on finding area and 
perimeter of rectangles and are very close to completing this same work on triangles.  I am working 
hard to be sure that side measures are no longer whole.  There will be chances to assess whether a 
student can find perimeter and area with whole numbers, but much of our practice will be with fractions.  

⅚ Science:  Students will receive a research packet next week with a human body system of their 
choice to begin learning about.  More details to follow on the project guidelines and assessment plan.

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

English/Language Arts: This week, we focused on coordinating conjunctions and clauses 
(independent and dependent). This skill is related to comma use when combining clauses, so that our 
sentences can be more complex, and not sound so choppy when we read. Practice of this skill was 
included on Reading log 18. To continue our learning about theater and drama, students had to 
complete a drawing that detailed a stage, complete with the appropriate naming of stage areas and 
components. In addition, students worked on theater specific vocabulary, and made slides to show 
their understanding. We took a break from social studies this week, so that students could focus on 
their one acts. We are just one week away from performances!

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

CMP8
This week the 8th graders needed some significant coaxing to get their “heads in the game”.  January 
is just about halfway for our students, and in a few weeks they will be starting to sign up for their high 
school courses. Geometry is the typical progression that students move to at CVU. However, they 
need to be in good standing in CMP8, which include meeting the majority of the learning targets, 
having the discipline to complete homework, participate in class discussions, and complete tasks in 
class.  Having a “heart-to-heart” with your 8th grader to encourage them to stay focused and 
committed would go a long way.  Thanks!

Incidentally, students took a quiz and explored rational and irrational numbers, and repeating and 
terminating decimals.

CMP7
We began the week with looking at tessellations and rep-tiles around school.  Students found many 
examples and were able to talk about scale factor, area, and perimeter of the rep-tiles we found.  
Students also did math problem rotations where we practiced ratios, proportions, scale factor, nested 
figures and similarity.

Science:
This week students had a independent assignment that included watching “Where do Humans Come 
From” and responding to questions in their journal.  This assignment is due next week.

Friday, January 12, 2018

Week of January 8th - 12th

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:
  • Jan 15th: No School
  • Thursday, January 25th - Voyager Play Evening Performance
  • Feb 2nd: Voyager Dance & Activity Night- Please note date as we will be looking for chaperones!  More info to come soon!

WCS is partnering again with the Williston Rep. Board to bring a social media presentation to our middle school students and parents.  Social media is everywhere and we need to help our students learn how to manage it in their lives.
Tuesday, January 9th:  Parent Evening Presentation from 6:30-8:30 in the auditorium
5th - 8th grade students will go to presentations Tuesday (1/9 for 5/6) & Wednesday (1/10 for 7/8)

Voyager House parent contributions to the Williston Schools Annual Fund are low this year. These funds support many of our field trips and programs. Please consider making a donation.  The Annual Fund completely funds our Vermont trips, including:

  • Sandbar field trip in the fall
  • Troy Wonderle - Circus Smirkus Day
  • Flynn trip this winter
  • Trout release field trip to Lewis Creek
  • Rokeby Museum Field Trip

The Annual Fund takes place of past fundraisers such as selling wrapping paper and writing individual checks for each field trip.  Your support will help ensure that these trips and other activities and programs will continue as planned.

If you have already contributed, thank you.  If you can do so today, please click here: https://willistonfap.wixsite.com/willistonfap/annual-fund

Thank you so much!

Hello TA could you please send out to all families.






The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
This week we started our personal narrative writing unit. First we used a couple of fun prompts to get us into the habit of writing. Then students generated ideas for stories using a variety of brainstorming techniques and started a checklist of tips that will make their narrative writing the best it can be.
Our play challenge also kicked into full gear. Students will be working on one act plays for the next 3 ½ weeks. They are separated into four 5-8 grade teams. By early next week, teams should have a script, cast, and tech support ready to go.

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

Math 5:
We had an exciting week, working through division of whole numbers and expanding our list of strategies to solve them.  We did have a big class Tuesday.  9 parents of 5th and 6th graders in our school attended a studio class to learn a little math with us.  The 5th graders were awesome!  We have some review to work through, in order to finish up Unit 3.  Students also began the CRM, a mid year math assessment that allows us to see how they are retaining the mathematics they are learning.  It is not a long test, but one that helps us revise intervention for students that need it and double back on some concepts that are overall lagging.  

Math 6:  We began our geometry unit last week, Covering and Surrounding.  The focus of the unit is on area and perimeter of 2 dimensional figures.  It is a very dynamic unit, in that students are not just finding perimeter and area, but changing the dimensions of figures and looking at how area and perimeter are affected.  We will move on to triangles next week and then to parallelograms and trapezoids.  I am supplementing homework during this unit, with challenging problems that are real world.  Students will be choosing their homework to suit their needs when I have these problems available.

⅚ Science:  We did a few exit tasks this week, from our Electromagnets unit, but otherwise, science is on hold during the play unit!

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

In Humanities this week, we worked on our independent reading with reading log 17. Reading logs are almost always due on Mondays, which allows for the weekend to be included. The skills highlighted this week were a review of past skills, including subject verb agreement and using context clues to decipher unknown vocabulary. We also reviewed our two goals: one academic and one personal. Students are expected to update these goals with progress and expected completion dates, or to write new goals if the previous goals have been accomplished. Finally, students completed a CNN 10 summary assignment using the news from 1/8/18.
Next week, we will be completing some drama/theater specific assignments.

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

CMP8
We have been working hard on our investigations of the Pythagorean Theorem.  Using dot paper and geoboards we have explored different types of right triangles and other triangles to see if a2 + b2 = c2 works.  
We began to solve problems with missing side lengths of triangles and looked at some common misconceptions.


CMP7
Students investigated different polygons to see if they tessellated or would produce a “rep-tile” . A rep-tile is a figure that is made up of a number of the similar figures that produces a larger or scaled figure to the original.
We explored which figures could tessellate, reptile and whether there was a pattern in the polygon that could do one or both.

We also learned three ways to solve proportions: vertically, horizontally and cross product.

We then looked at similar figures, that were missing side lengths. We used one of these methods to find the answer.

Science 7th/8th

Students are doing independent work during the play unit.