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)
Annual Voyager Recycle Sale
March 24, 2018 from 9:00 -12:00 PM
Dear Voyager Parents,
It is that time of year again, when Voyager House hosts our Annual Voyager Recycle Sale, (Indoor Yard Sale) to raise money for Voyager overnight field trips.
Items to Sell: We appreciate gently-used and never-used items that you think would be someone else’s treasure! We especially ask that you donate at least one small item (worth about $5) or one larger item (worth about $10+). If you have something of greater value, Mr. Merrill will help to price it appropriately. That way when antique dealers come, Voyager benefits the most from that item’s worth. The clean up can be difficult, so please follow the Goodwill guidelines for what they can accept and not accept, so that we aren’t charged for disposal. (https://www.amazinggoodwill.com/donating/donor-guidelines)
Donation Drop Off: If you can, drop those items off on Friday, March 23rd, from 6-8 PM. If you cannot make that drop off time, please feel free to bring those items to Katie Fieldsend’s office in the Project Room.
Items We Need Donated to Make the Sale Successful: Bags, boxes, sale stickers to place on items, did we say bags and boxes! These can all be dropped off prior to the sale in Voyager Project Room.
Thanks for all you do to make Voyager a great place to learn!
Voyager Teachers
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
Reading Cafe: We are reading a book about Lewis and Clark aloud. Students are making a sequence map of important events.
PLP Reflections: Students are reflecting on their 2nd semester, writing a letter to parents that will serve as a source for our upcoming parent conferences.
Lewis and Clark: We read a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis. It contained all of the orders and expectations for the expedition. Students summarized these orders, prepared a journal cover, and started to write their first journal entries as members of the Corps of Discovery. We also watched clips from the Ken Burns series on Lewis and Clark to understand the challenges and obstacles they faced.
Permission slips went home for the ⅚ trip to the Flynn next week. Please look for it to sign and send back. Thanks!
⅚ Voyager is welcoming a new intern!
"Kevin McElroy is a graduate student at the University of Vermont who will be working with Aron Merrill's 5/6th graders for the remainder of the year. Although new to Voyager, Kevin has spent time in Williston Central School this year and is looking forward to working on the team. After gaining a BA in History from the University of Vermont in 2015, he has spent time as a historic site guide in the Adirondacks, a middle school para-educator in Newton, MA and an ESL teacher in Prague, Czech Republic, using these experiences to help improve his teaching styles and practices. In his free time, Kevin enjoys writing and playing music, snowboarding and traveling. He's looking forward to a great few months with Aron and his Voyager students!"
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
** Away at a conference the end of this week- see next week’s Voice for class update **
Math 5:
Math 6:
⅚ Science:
The Week in Mr. Roof’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
ELA and Social Studies: This week, we began our study of world religions. We will focus on Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism, but discuss other religions as well. We will have community expert from each religion visit our class to give us more information and to answer our questions. Students are working on completing a comparison chart, using research and class materials. We examined the complex, historical city of Jerusalem, and answered questions from a reading. In addition, we worked on CNN 10 and our Independent Reading with reading log 24. The use of commas and semicolons, along with capital letters is an ongoing focus for our writing. We are also trying to improve our written responses by using more specific details.
The Week from Mr. Shepley’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
This week in CMP8, students began investigations of triangle congruence and its relevance to transformations of shapes. This has been an introductory week to geometric proofs that they will, without a doubt, be encountering over the next few years in high school. Students engaged in speed dating activities to find congruent partner shapes, drawing triangles and attempting to disprove theorems, and applying their new understanding to prior proof methods of transformations. Students will be wrapping up problem set 2.3 that blends our congruent determining short cuts with shape transformations. Class records will find their place on our walls next week as student move toward completing this unit.
CMP7
Ratios, rates, proportions, equivalent fractions, and scaling have been the name game this week. Students started the week with an investigation determining the difference in caffeine concentration between 5 common energy drinks. Students found that 5 hour energy was the highest concentration of caffeine per ounce - lots of good math discussions around this. Students continued to hone their skills of constructing, analyzing, and expressing ratios and rates from word problems. Friday morning, students did a quick lab to refresh approaches to scaling in a new context. How many drops of water fit on a penny - how can we find the number of drops for a quarter? Fun week in math, students will continue exploring proportions next week as we work toward our check up.
Science 7th/8th
With the launch of our Earth Science unit Monday, students spent the first few days of the week examining the scale of geologic time. This is an important perspective to conceptualize. Students converted important geologic event from billions of years ago into the more tangible units of meters, centimeters, and mm. Students found that local geologic features, such as, the green mountains, Iapetus ocean, lake vermont, glaciers, and more occurred relatively recently in the grand scheme of time - and that the presence of human beings is the analogous to the last letter, of the last word of our Earth’s timeline. Student’s engaged in an activity at the end of the day Friday, reconstructing Pangea - a concept that is launching our coursework Monday, as we investigate large scale mechanisms of change that influence our Earth’s surface. Students completed a claim and evidence statement from this lab activity.
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