Week of April 2-6

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)

TESTING...TESTING...TESTING

Hello Voyager House Families,

Next week Voyager House will be conducting the SBAC and Science testing.

We would GREATLY APPRECIATE that you make every effort not to schedule regular appointments during this time as all testing needs to be made up at a later time.

Also - please support your child by encouraging good sleep and healthy food/snacks/drinks.

Also- Don’t forget to equip your child with earbuds!

Thanks so much parents and guardians!

VOYAGER 5-8 SBAC Testing Schedule

MON 4/9	TUES 4/10	WED  4/11	THURS 4/12	FRI 4/13
Regular	8:30-10:30 ELA CAT	8:30-10:30 ELA CAT 1:15-2:45 Math CAT	8:30-10:30 ELA PT *read text *first draft handwritten 1:15-2:45 ELA PT Type up and edit	8:30-10:30 Math PT

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

We did some preparation for SBAC testing which starts on Tuesday next week. Students reviewed the training and practice sites and answered some practice questions.

Mr. McElroy and the students have wrapped up reading Nightjohn and will be taking this week to focus on important historical events leading up to the Civil War and how these events affected or were affected by the institution of slavery.

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

Math 5:  Students had a ton of fun this week playing with the characteristics of polygons.  Specifically we reviewed key characteristics like parallelism, perpendicularity, congruent, side measure, number of sides, and angle measures within polygons in order to name them.  Students brought prior knowledge and some new ideas to the table when solving Polygon Riddles. Students were given clues, one at a time, that were true characteristics of polygons, in order to ultimately name the polygon.  Students also continued work with visual patterns and graphing them, in order to solidifying graphing techniques and make claims about the story of a growing pattern.

Math 6:  6th graders made a big algebraic dive this week by graphing all week and looking at linearity.  Does the data graph as a line or not? What does that graph tell us about the data? We graphed several scenarios this week, from distance traveled on a bike tour, to cost of bike rentals, to look for patterns and trends that might tell the story of the data.  Students have become excellent at graphing and specifically discussed: why are two lines parallel? What happens when a line crosses the y axis at zero? At some other place? Where can I see those realities in the table? What happens when one line is higher than the other?  What does this tell us about rate? What does an intersecting set of graphed data tell us? We are moving in the direction of understanding how equations can further clarify the story of graphed data!

⅚ Science:

Students continued to make way on their modeling human body interactions.  Group work has been a great aspect of this project. We ended our week with the UVM Pathology Dept, who brought technicians in to show students, how blood is drawn, what autopsies reveal about a person’s disease history, what urine and blood can tell us, what bacteria lives on our door knobs and faucets, and how we use microscopes to diagnose.  It was really interesting!

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

ELA:  Our 7th and 8th graders are continuing to work on their commonly confused words. There are so many words, and they’re all affected by the effects of definitions and spelling! Independent reading focused on these words, complex and compound sentences, and also analysis of author’s craft. This means that students examined the WHY behind the choices that authors make, either with plot elements or with the actual structure and word choice. Students continued reading sacred stories and answering comprehension questions. In addition, students read a synopsis of Guys and Dolls so that they would have more background knowledge when watching the school musical.

SS:  Students worked on current events, using CNN 10. We are working on using evidence to support a quote, and will be transitioning to analysis of stories from summary soon. Students also used time to work on their math and science projects this week, and did not have class on Thursday due to the musical. We also worked on world religions by completing a practice quiz.

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

CMP7

This week was all about statistics!  Students formed survey questions that elicited both categorical and numerical data. Questions like: What sport do you participate in? How many hours do you study? How much sleep do you get at night?  What social media app do you use? We began to analyze our data and looked for trends, make some comparisons and making meaning from the numbers. Students were asked to make predictions before we began data collection and we will see how accurate they were. Beside learning about different graphic representation, we will learn to use Google Sheets to create graphs and use different functions.

This week we learned about the 5 number summary: minimum, maximum, median, quartile 1, quartile 3. We then created box and whisker plots that represented the data.

Before break we will wrap up this unit with a summary of our findings and the Comparing and Scaling Unit Test.

CMP8

We completed our Butterflies, Pinwheels and Wallpaper unit with finishing our mandela project.  Students needed to address how their images showed: translation, symmetry, dilation, rotation and reflection.  They came out beautifully. We began our BPW unit test and will continue into the next week.

Science 7th/8th

This morning our students shared with the greater Williston Community their learning of their self selected geology topics. Our 3rd and 4th grade visitors were very impressed with the models, activities, and enthusiasm our students shared with them. Hats off to the hard work our 7th and 8th graders presented today, we were all truly impressed with their exhibits. Be sure to ask your child about their presentation and topic! Mrs. Quatt will be taking the back the saddle in science, it has been a pleasure teaching our students for the past 4 weeks and I look forward to continuing to work with them as we approach May.