what’s happening in Voyager this year. ***
Voyager Survival Unit Begins Monday, 1/7/19!
- Please remind your students to bring in warm clothes each day over the next few weeks. Our survival unit will have them spending some extended periods of time outside. And because the unit involves group challenges, everyone needs to be outside! Students are welcome to leave gear here if that helps them remember.
- These sessions are great opportunities for spending time after school engaged in an activity with others, learning something new and fun, and building relationships with adults and peers. Students are encouraged to register with a friend. If they do, be sure to note this at the end of the registration form so the Spark Coordinator can ensure they can join the same session.
- Check out the great new line up of workshops: creative cooking, origami, card games, Lego fun, cartooning, and weaving.
- Students can register online via this registration form, or just ask their TA for assistance. The form is also located in the School Bell.
- Registration Deadline is now Friday, 1/18/19:
- If you haven’t done so already, please review the documents below with your 8th grader about the exciting 8th Grade Celebration Trip to Ridin-Hy Ranch next spring.
- Registration and permission slips are due on or before January 18, 2019.
- Please join us for a fun-filled family evening of Magic and Hypnosis with Marko the Magician on Friday night, January 11, 2019 at 6:30pm - sponsored by Swift House. Entertainment for all ages! Concession! Click here for the Ticket Form.
- Where: Champlain Valley Union High School, CVU Gym
- For: 8th Grade Parents and Students of the Class of 2023
- When: Thursday, January 24, 6:30-8:00 p.m.
- Click here for more information.
- This evening will provide you and your son/daughter an introduction to the academic and elective programs they will experience in the 9th grade.
A clear and calm morning routines helps students to enter their school day successfully. We are encountering more and more students coming to school between 7:30-7:55 am and we are not equipped to handle the numbers. Please do not drop your child off prior to 7:55 am unless it is absolutely essential. If you have to drop your child off early, please reinforce that the expectation is that students sitting in the front lobby until 7:55 am and engaging in a quiet activities. Ex. listening to music, reading or finishing homework. Thanks for your help with this. - Jackie Parks
Reminder from Ms. Sherman:
- 8th Grade Challenge help is being provided through our Spark program on Thursdays. Harbor teachers, Ms. Griffin and Ms. Taylor, will be available on Thursdays from 3:00-4:30 to give students assistance from any house! It's a great time to get work done and get great advice and instruction on your challenge.
cobrien@cvsdvt.org
amerrill@cvsdvt.org
jroof@cvsdvt.org
mquatt@cvsdvt.org
After School Homework Club: CHANGE IN DAYS OFFERED
- Voyager House offers an after-school program to all 5-8 grade Voyager students who would like a smaller, quieter setting for work completion. We accept any student who is motivated to be there and willing to work independently and who is open to support. We may also recommend this opportunity to students who are in need of work completion or who consistently fail to complete assigned work. It has been a great program for students and we are happy to have the staffing and funding to offer it again this year. Ms. Kim and Ms. Allison, our two house paras, will be the contact adults for this group.
- Every Tuesday (2:00-3:00) and Thursday (3:00-4:40) right after dismissal.
- Occasionally cancelled due to staffing. We will let you know as far in advance as we know!
- A late bus is available for transportation home.
- Membership is through interest and motivation as well as strong recommendations from teachers.
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/
- WCS Athletics - Click this link to the website to view all information regarding the WCS Athletics program.
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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ACADEMIC UPDATES
Mr. Roof
Humanities 7&8
This week, I was out ill for two days. Students worked on their independent reading, watching a PBS World War I documentary, and reading the Jack London short story To Build A Fire with the Voyager 5/6 students. They completed reading comprehension questions individually, and then collaborated on a sequence map. The story was read in preview of our survivor unit beginning Monday.
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Mr. Merrill
We did a soft kick off for our survival unit this week. Our 7th and 8th graders met with our 5th and 6th Humanities students and in small groups read “To Build a Fire” by Jack London. Students sequenced the events of the story in these mixed groups. We also read some real life survival stories.
Students selected books for our next literature group round. All of the books connect to our survival theme. Titles include: Into Thin Air, Hatchet, Endurance, PEAK, Refugee, My Side of the Mountain, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Who is Ernest Shakleton, and The Martian (some books are for ⅞ only).
Next week workshops will begin for our survival unit. Students will have a notebook for the workshops. We reviewed and practiced note taking skills this week including power notes and two column notes. Students will use their note taking skills next week and are allowed to use their notebooks as a reference during the survival challenges in two weeks.
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Ms. O’Brien Classes
Math 5: We had a great week this week reviewing our December learning. With the interruption of Harry Potter and the Star Math test administered, we had to make some old connections to move forward. We are back on track and successfully moving through the rest of the Prime Time unit. Students learned the skill of prime factorization, in which you decompose a number so that it is a product of primes. For example, 12 can be decomposed into all of its prime factors in the string, 2 x 2 x 3. From this process we learned that we can find all factors of that number, we can use that prime factorization to also identify the greatest common factor or least common multiple of two numbers. Pretty handy skill! See public records for our week in review.
Math 6: We spent the week going back to learning from before vacation so that we could make moves forward in the unit! We reviewed multiplication and division of fractions, and today, introduced fact families. All of these skills add great value to both problem solving with fractions, and problems involving variables. Because we had to unearth some old learning, we spent two full days just calculating with fractions. I find this repeated practice really helpful for proficiency, and so it was time well spent. See public records for specific week in review.
5/6 Science: We wrapped up our Changing Matter unit with the introduction that changes to matter can be characterized by scientists in one of two ways, either physical change or chemical change. Students had the chance to consider phenomena in the real world that change and dig into whether that change is physical or chemical. Each student then did a reflection on their Changing Matter Harry Potter demonstration to characterize the kind of change they believe was true about their demo. We spent two days practicing main idea and details notetaking in preparation for our Winter Survival Unit next week. Students read about Brook Trout lifecycles (eggs are coming soon!) and about why Everest is so deadly (in terms of the effects on the human body). We are in the ‘in between’ in units, so rather than start our gravity unit, I opted for some skill building in reading comprehension and notetaking! It will serve them well next week!
Just to brighten your day with a little Harry Potter revisited…
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