Voyager Welcomes Lauren Drasler to the Team
Hello Team Voyager Families,
My name is Lauren Drasler and I have recently enrolled in the Teacher Apprenticeship Program through Champlain College. I’m really excited to be starting my career as a teacher at Williston Central School. I was born and raised in southern Vermont, and recently moved back to Burlington after living in Plainfield, Vermont for a year.
My name is Lauren Drasler and I have recently enrolled in the Teacher Apprenticeship Program through Champlain College. I’m really excited to be starting my career as a teacher at Williston Central School. I was born and raised in southern Vermont, and recently moved back to Burlington after living in Plainfield, Vermont for a year.
I graduated from the University of Vermont in 2014 with a B.S. in Animal Science and a minor in Public Communication. It was through my time at UVM that I truly discovered my love of science, and further developed my passion for literature and writing through my communications classes. I am eager to share both of these interests with your students during my internship at Williston Central School.
For the past two years, I served as an AmeriCorps member in the Vermont Youth AmeriCorps program. During my first year of service I oversaw an internship program for high school students, and in my second year, I had the opportunity to assist with and grow a mentoring program in central Vermont. These experiences helped me to realize my interest in working with youth, and led me to pursue this teaching certification in both middle school English and science.
I am excited to share my experiences and ideas with your students in Voyager House at Williston Central School. Please feel free to e-mail me (ldrasler@cvsdvt.org) with any questions. I look forward to meeting and working with you in the coming months.
Best,
Lauren Drasler 8th Grade Yearbook - Baby Pictures Wanted!
- Every year the 8th graders get to submit a quote and baby picture to go along with their school picture. This is a fun part of the yearbook although it is not required. Every 8th grader received an email with a link for their quote. Baby pictures can be emailed to me or your house TA. If the picture is a hard copy you can also give that to me or your house TA. Please make sure your name and house is written on the back so we can get the picture back to you. Pictures will be returned to you within a week of the deadline. The deadline for quotes and baby pictures is February 18th.
- Please contact abeauregard@cvsdvt.org with any questions.
- To order online go to jostensyearbooks.com
- Yearbook Order Form
Meal Train For Matthew Yandow
amerrill@cvsdvt.org
jroof@cvsdvt.org
mquatt@cvsdvt.org
After School Homework Club: CHANGE IN DAYS OFFERED
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IMPORTANT LINKS
Voyager House Learning Tools for teachers, students, and parents
ACADEMIC UPDATES
Survival Unit:
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FOLLOWING TEAMS:
1. The Dogcats: They were the overall survival challenge winners
2. The FasterFish: They were the team "most likely to survive," based upon collaboration
Check out more Survival pictures below!
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Mr. Roof - 7&8 Humanities
This week in humanities, students worked hard to write excellent book recommendations and to create original covers for the books. We then shared our recommendations as a class on Friday. In addition, students worked on IXL. Students are completing a diagnostic, which will help to make IXL more personalized and meaningful. We also had literature groups this week, and will finish them on Monday. In addition, we went to Harbor House's play The day the internet died, which challenged us to think deeply about our use and reliance upon the internet.
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Ms.Q/ Mr. Sironi
CMP8
This week we completed exponential rotations that focused on a variety of problems that reviewed all aspects of our exponential growth functions, exponent rules, and operations with scientific notation. Students created class records and then we began our assessment. We will be moving on to a new unit next week called “It’s in the System” which will focus on linear systems and inequalities.
CMP7
The 7th graders began the week with constructing 3-D figures and comparing the surface area and volume of similar sized cylinders,triangular prisms and rectangular prisms. We looked at the physical properties of those figures to find out which one would have more our less surface area and volume. Students completed class records and began their summative assessment. Next week we will begin a new unit called “Stretching and Shrinking” which looks at geometric scaling.
Science:
This week was an abridged week in science. We began our astronomy unit with the “Big Bang”. Students looked back 1.3825 x 1010 years and we started the conversation of what happened as the universe expanded. Students began work on a timeline of what happened as the universe gained matter, energy, weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity and electromagnetism. We moved several hundred million years into the future to where stars and galaxies began to form. As we move forward toward the present students will begin to get a glimpse of the vast nature of time, distance and space.
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Mr. Merrill - ⅚ Humanities
National Geographic Geo Bee: We had a great competition this week. Congratulations to Ian Kennelly and Kevin Lahiri for making it to the school finals. Kevin Lahiri won the school championship! He will be going to Middlebury College to represent Williston in the state finals.
Economics: We kicked off our economics unit this week. Financial literacy is our first topic. Students read an article and then made posters with tips for spending, saving, investing, earning, and donating. We also started to make vocabulary maps for all of the economic vocabulary in the unit. Next week we will begin preparation for the Stock Market Game. Students will be on teams and investing $100,000 in the real, live stock market.
Survival Unit Wrap Up: Students used their notebooks from the survival unit to come up with details and topics to determine the “big ideas” learned from the unit. This was a writing exercise that required deep thinking skills.
More Survival Unit Pictures!
Ms. O'Brien's Week!
Math 5: Students worked with a few real world problems in order to identify patterns and graph those patterns to allow us to know more about what was happening in the pattern as time passes. Students played a battleship type game and worked with a scenario where a kiddo is trying to figure out which job would be the better one to take, if he were trying to earn a certain amount of money. We then moved on to identifying attributes of polygons.
Math 6: Students have been working with some new resources this unit, that I believe have provided some good twists to the usual geometry resources we use. It has felt a little worksheety to be, which means that kids are working through a series of puzzling questions that allow some to move forward more quickly than others. We have had a lot of good conversations to pull us together, no matter how far students get, which I think has proven to be good differentiation.
Science ⅚: We launched our Earth, Moon and Beyond unit with Wile E. Coyote falling from the cliff, after Roadrunner scared him off! This is our anchoring phenomenon for the first part of the unit as we work to understand gravity and forces on Earth. Students brainstormed patterns they noticed and questions they have about the phenomenon on Friday and will begin to investigate next week.
- More dates have been added to the Meal Train for Matthew Yandow, a former WCS student (and brother of Voyager's Mackenzie Yandow) who had a stroke on October 21 of last year. Matt is now a 16 year old sophomore at CVU, and is just returning part time to school after missing almost three months of instruction. He is also attending OT and PT appointments multiple times a week. His mom, Amy, has been busy driving him all around to all of these appointments and has not been able to return to work, so the meal train has been really helpful for the family. Please consider bringing them a meal if you know them and you are able to. Here is the Meal Train Link. If it's inconvenient for you to bring a meal to their house after school, you can drop it off at Voyager House with Ted Milks and he will see that it gets delivered to the family. Thank you for considering!
- 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
- 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.
- Please email tmilks@cvsdvt.org and your core teacher if your student will be absent, needs to be picked up during the day for an appointment, or will ride a different bus home. Core teacher emails are:
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.
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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.
ACADEMIC UPDATES
Survival Unit:
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FOLLOWING TEAMS:
1. The Dogcats: They were the overall survival challenge winners
2. The FasterFish: They were the team "most likely to survive," based upon collaboration
Check out more Survival pictures below!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Roof - 7&8 Humanities
This week in humanities, students worked hard to write excellent book recommendations and to create original covers for the books. We then shared our recommendations as a class on Friday. In addition, students worked on IXL. Students are completing a diagnostic, which will help to make IXL more personalized and meaningful. We also had literature groups this week, and will finish them on Monday. In addition, we went to Harbor House's play The day the internet died, which challenged us to think deeply about our use and reliance upon the internet.
Ms.Q/ Mr. Sironi
CMP8
This week we completed exponential rotations that focused on a variety of problems that reviewed all aspects of our exponential growth functions, exponent rules, and operations with scientific notation. Students created class records and then we began our assessment. We will be moving on to a new unit next week called “It’s in the System” which will focus on linear systems and inequalities.
CMP7
The 7th graders began the week with constructing 3-D figures and comparing the surface area and volume of similar sized cylinders,triangular prisms and rectangular prisms. We looked at the physical properties of those figures to find out which one would have more our less surface area and volume. Students completed class records and began their summative assessment. Next week we will begin a new unit called “Stretching and Shrinking” which looks at geometric scaling.
Science:
This week was an abridged week in science. We began our astronomy unit with the “Big Bang”. Students looked back 1.3825 x 1010 years and we started the conversation of what happened as the universe expanded. Students began work on a timeline of what happened as the universe gained matter, energy, weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity and electromagnetism. We moved several hundred million years into the future to where stars and galaxies began to form. As we move forward toward the present students will begin to get a glimpse of the vast nature of time, distance and space.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
National Geographic Geo Bee: We had a great competition this week. Congratulations to Ian Kennelly and Kevin Lahiri for making it to the school finals. Kevin Lahiri won the school championship! He will be going to Middlebury College to represent Williston in the state finals.
Economics: We kicked off our economics unit this week. Financial literacy is our first topic. Students read an article and then made posters with tips for spending, saving, investing, earning, and donating. We also started to make vocabulary maps for all of the economic vocabulary in the unit. Next week we will begin preparation for the Stock Market Game. Students will be on teams and investing $100,000 in the real, live stock market.
Survival Unit Wrap Up: Students used their notebooks from the survival unit to come up with details and topics to determine the “big ideas” learned from the unit. This was a writing exercise that required deep thinking skills.
More Survival Unit Pictures!
Ms. O'Brien's Week!
Math 5: Students worked with a few real world problems in order to identify patterns and graph those patterns to allow us to know more about what was happening in the pattern as time passes. Students played a battleship type game and worked with a scenario where a kiddo is trying to figure out which job would be the better one to take, if he were trying to earn a certain amount of money. We then moved on to identifying attributes of polygons.
Math 6: Students have been working with some new resources this unit, that I believe have provided some good twists to the usual geometry resources we use. It has felt a little worksheety to be, which means that kids are working through a series of puzzling questions that allow some to move forward more quickly than others. We have had a lot of good conversations to pull us together, no matter how far students get, which I think has proven to be good differentiation.
Science ⅚: We launched our Earth, Moon and Beyond unit with Wile E. Coyote falling from the cliff, after Roadrunner scared him off! This is our anchoring phenomenon for the first part of the unit as we work to understand gravity and forces on Earth. Students brainstormed patterns they noticed and questions they have about the phenomenon on Friday and will begin to investigate next week.
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