Week of May 7th - 11th

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:

• May 24th - 25th: 8th grade Overnight to Ridin’ Hy
• May 24th - 5th & 6th graders, Rokeby Museum Field Trip
• May 24th - 7th graders, Walking to Adams Market (12:00 - 2:45pm)
• May 25th - 7th graders, UVM Ropes Course Field Trip
• May 28th - No School (Memorial Day)
• May 30th- 8th graders World Language Final Exams 8:10 - 10:30am
• June 14th - 8th grade Graduation 6:30pm (Last day of school for 8th graders)
• June 15th - ½ Day, Last day of school

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

Highlights:

• Partner Read Aloud of Soldier’s Heart. Students continued to identify topics and record tier 2 words in their Reading Response Notebooks.
• Brook trout stocking at Lewis Creek in Starksboro, VT (see pictures below). Students stocked 500 ten inch brook trout with Vermont Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologists. We also released our 85 brook trout fingerlings.
• We took a look at the advantages and disadvantages for the Union and Confederacy leading up to the war. Students wrote a letter to an imaginary relative in 1861, explaining which side will win the war and why.
• Divided Loyalties -  A classroom play. Students participated in a classroom play performance that highlighted how the Civil War divided families, setting brother against brother.
• DRP Assessment: All students completed the Degrees of Reading Power assessment. Scores and more information about the assessment will be mailed home.

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

Math 5:

Students began their very first unit of Connected Math this week by playing the Factor Game.  Student’s fluency plays a big role in this game, so keep up the fluency work. Still the 6’s -9’s are shaky, so please practice here and there.  A ten minute ride in the car can make a big difference? What is 9 x 6? How about 7 x 8? Looking for accuracy first, and then with time, speed!

After that, we’ve had very little math. We used the time to SBAC science test, but now that this is complete, we will move back into full time math!

Prime Time, our new book should be completed by year’s end.

Math 6:  

Students have been working hard on equation writing and seeing patterns in how terms in an equation, pop up in tables, graphs, and visual patterns.  There are some really good habits in place, where students are seeing that looping a set of data (see below) might reveal the rate, or coefficient of the variable.  

We agreed upon these ideas:

• The rate is the coefficient, the coefficient is the rate.
• Looping data (a less fancy way of saying “finding finite difference) helps reveal the coefficient.
• Find the value for y when x is zero seems to help us with equation writing.
• Data with constant rates will graph as a line.

Next steps are to work on:

• The higher the coefficient the steeper the line.
• The value of y when x is zero seems to be where the line crosses the y axis
• There is more than one way to write an equation for a given pattern.
• Order of operations proficiency.

We will be wrapping up Variables and Patterns and prepping for the final assessment next week.

⅚ Science:

We actually got a lot of science in this week, despite science SBAC testing. We used the spaces in between.

Focal points for discussions:

What do we know about the Grand Prismatic Pool?  That the fog above the pool is condensation. To trace the roots of the condensation, we need to go to the pool of water, which Ms. O revealed was hot and deep.  Molecule movement is heat energy and we measure heat energy with temperature. Therefore the hot water in the pool must have a lot of heat energy and thus the temperature is hot.  As these molecules move faster and faster, they vaporize. This vaporization could be evaporation or boiling, but either way, the liquid water molecules change into water vapor, or gas molecules.  As those liquid molecules vaporize and then cool, they condense or change back into liquid from a gas.

Our next steps are to consider how this pool of water is heated.  Some students made claims that a volcano is heating the water, while others believe it is the sun’s heat that causes this vaporization.  Thus our next pursuit, to look at the earthquake data in Yellowstone, to figure out why they have so many. We had fun talking about P and S waves, and how they are like light energy and sound energy in terms of their speeds and how this helps us detect earthquakes.  The next step is to determine why earthquakes happen! This will be our plunge into the earth’s interior.

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

ELA: This week, students really focused on participles. You know,  those tricky verb-type words mostly ending in -ing and -ed? Yeah, tons of fun. Very important words, and our students are doing well with identifying and using them in sentences. We did a few online quizzes to strengthen our skills. We also took the degrees of reading power assessment (aka DRP). Those are scored, and results will be shared at a later date.

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

CMP8

This week we completed our overview of quadratic functions with using algebra tiles to model factored and expanded form of quadratic equations. This is an area model.  The outside is the factored form and the inside is the expanded form.

We also learned how to transform parabolas from the parent function of y= x2  to a different location, direction and rate of change (fat or skinny)  y=-.5x2 + 3  The negative sign reflects it, the .5 is a slower rate of change, so it is wider and the + 3 moves it vertically up 3 units.

Students finished the week with an assessment.  Next week we are moving on to systems of linear equations with the book. It’s in the System.

CMP7

The 7th graders have been working with all sorts of models to show linear relationships.  We have utilized graphs, tables, equations and mobiles. In this model you need to figure out what number each symbol represents.

Students are learning to create equations from tables and have begun to understand negative slope, what a y-intercept is and the difference between direct variation equations and those that have a y-intercept.  

Science 7th/8th

Our science class has been feverishly finishing up our engineering lab reports.  It has been very sad that we have not been able to complete our experiments with the shake table.  However, we are doing our best to speak to the qualitative observations that we made during our testing process.  The lab report was handed in on Friday and we are beginning our final unit on Natural hazards.