Friday, October 12, 2018

Week of October 8th - 12th

UPCOMING EVENTS, NEWS, and REMINDERS

Please visit the Voyager Web Site to keep in touch with what’s happening in Voyager this year.

  • PARENT/TEACHER CONFERENCES - check your email for an invitation to sign up for a time slot.
    • 5/6: Monday Oct. 15th and Friday Oct. 19th.  
    • 7/8: Friday Oct. 19th and Friday Oct. 26th. No school on the 19th.
  • FUN NIGHT!
    • Friday, October 26th for grades K-5.
    • Pre-registration forms are available with the link below or the front office. 
    • Pre-registration forms will be picked up at noon on Friday, October 26th, after that time payment will at the front door only.
  • Please do not bring in food to share.  We have many food restrictions on house.  Thanks!

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IMPORTANT LINKS

Student Assistant Professional (SAP) - https://spark.adobe.com/page/ssMYvqB70CDFQ/
Voyager House Learning Tools
for teachers, students, and parents


Google Site - an important site for regular communication coming from Voyager.  This site will be modified weekly and should be bookmarked on your desktop or laptop.  This site contains a link to weekly academic summaries as well as important upcoming events.  https://sites.google.com/cvsdvt.org/voyagerhouse/home
Google Classroom - an online planner platform where students can check on daily assignments.  This is in lieu of a paper planner. Just ask your child to log in using his/her email.  It is important to know that this is not an assessment database.  We do not check completion of the assignment on this platform.  However, we do ask that YOUR CHILD press the button MARK AS DONE when an assignment is completed. This will make it easy for you and your child to discuss completion of work.
Google Mail - an email system used by Williston Central School.  All students have an email account and students use it regularly to communicate with peers around collaborative work and project-based learning.  This is a great way for teachers to communicate with students and a great way for students to get reminders about assignments from Google Classroom.  
Jumprope - an online platform for assessment of the targets.  Students can view weekly or biweekly his/her achievement on the targets by logging in using his/her email and a password.  This password was emailed to each student in a letter last week. *Habits of Learning, like homework completion and collaborative learning skills will be posted on a biweekly schedule.  This is where you CAN SEE whether your child is in good standing on daily assignments.https://nyc.jumpro.pe/login/


Protean - an online Personalized Learning Plan (PLP) platform used primarily at this point by 7th and 8th graders. ⅚ students may post executive function skills reflections, personal interest projects, and other measures of growth and reflection after 1st trimester.  https://app.protean.me/index.html


IXL - a program that supports students on math and language arts skills. https://www.ixl.com/signin


Moby Max - a math program used by ⅚ math students to build computational fluency and fill gaps in understanding on major concepts.  Students have a username and password for this program.
Typing Club - a program used by the ⅚ humanities students to build typing skills.
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CLASSROOM UPDATES
Ms. Q
CMP8
This week in math class we took our Linear Model Assessment.  Students took their time, showed their thinking and results will be available on Jumprope over the next few days. We have begun our new book “Thinking With Mathematical Models” with several experiments involving paper bridges.  We create a span and tested thickness of paper layers and its ability to handle the mass of pennies. The second experiment we did was change the length of the bridge across the span and again tested its ability to hold up to mass.  We compared our outcomes and began seeing the difference between linear and non-linear models.
CMP7
We finished up our “Accentuate the Negative” unit with looking at the Order of Operation and the Distributive Property.  We practiced number sentences with playing cards and learned about a visual model to show the distributive property.
We learned the factored of this model which is 6( x + 4)  and expanded form which is 6x + 24. We even tried one that was a little more advanced.
We completed our week with creating class records and preparing for our unit assessment next week.
Science
This week in science we reviewed our materials and took our summative on Newton’s 3 Laws.  Students were asked to connect their lab experiments with each of Newton’s laws. They had to draw diagrams, analyze data, create graphs and create claim and evidence statements.  We finished the week with introducing our engineering task and doing background research on mousetraps.

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Mr. Roof 7&8 Humanities
Lots of great writing happening this week!  Students are using all of their knowledge, quotes, and facts to craft LEAF responses to their choice of the following two prompts: Who would you vote for and why?  OR  Which candidate is the best for the office of _____ and why?  Students were able to use RETNs excellent footage as a resource too, which was exciting to see, since our students were filmed asking questions. We specifically worked on writing hooks and establishing claims, in addition to the other components. We also worked on independent reading, trying to establish a goal of at least 30 minutes/day. Reading log 3 supported this, which is due on Monday. Students also worked on IXL, geography skills, and CNN 10.

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Ms. O’Brien’s 5/6 Classes
  • Math 5:  Students wrapped up the first unit of the year by reviewing key concepts and taking the unit assessment!  Two targets were assessed, geometric reasoning and using operations and symbols. I was especially pleased by the student’s persistence with the assessment which took most, a full class period.  I scored the assessment and students have made corrections and done a reflection. In addition, post assessment questions were administered to those students who met the target to expand understanding and help me to know their preparedness for operations and expressions with abstractions, like letters to represent numbers.  Assessments will be shared at conferences. We also came back to a problem from last week that was algebraic in nature, and worked on this Friday.
  • Math 6:  Students worked on correcting assessments from the halfway point of the unit and then continued to work on ratio reasoning by making a return to fractions and decimals. We modeled most of our reasoning this week on number lines, to help us compare and order numbers by magnitude.  Introductions to language like, rational numbers, irrational numbers, absolute value, positive and negative numbers, and a return to language we already know, mixed, proper, and improper fractions, will allow us to talk more clearly about what we know about numbers. Claims were made about numbers on the number line that will help us especially with the negative side of the number line, which can be really confusing to students!  
  • Science ⅚ :  We dug in further to our ideas about photosynthesis this week engaging in an investigation about, of all things, roofs!  We used model houses to measure the changing temperature of two roofs, one shingled and the other, grass, in order to compare black roofs with green roofs.  The goal was to further seek understanding of the importance of plants to our planet. We collected data every two minutes for 28 minutes, with both the light on (our sun) and the light off (night).  We measured the exterior and interior temperatures of the houses and graphed the results. Some interesting data was collected. We will analyze our graphs next week so that we can make another claim about plants.  * We will be reviewing the IPCC’s report on climate change next week and drafting letters to our legislators as a writing project. If you see newspaper or magazine articles about the report, please feel free to send them in.  We will be reading a few article about climate change and want a variety of resources.
Mr. Merrill's 5/6 Humanities:
This week we dove into our LEAF writing - answering the question,  "Who would you vote for and why?" Students had to use evidence from the candidate forum, which meant they had to pick a candidate, listen to his/her responses to the questions, and record the best answers. If you would like to see the candidate forum it is available.
Williston Central School Candidate Forum

We did some reflection on our last LEAF essay. Students received their first scores and reflected on their work and made a goal for their next LEAF essay.

We started our Mystery and Spook Unit. 5th grade students are reading “Closed for the Season” and 6th grade students are reading “Coraline”. Students have weekly reading assignments and work to complete in their reading response notebook. We will be working on mapping the setting and the characters of these books. Students can also look for tier 2 words to add to their ongoing lists in their reading response notebooks.



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