Friday, February 22, 2019

Week of February 18 - 22

UPCOMING EVENTS, NEWS, and REMINDERS

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


Seeking Indoor Garage Sale Donations

Voyager House is holding its annual Indoor Garage Sale on Saturday, March 30th in the WCS cafeteria from 8:00am - 2:00pm. It’s a giant indoor Reuse/Resale that raises money to benefit Voyager House.

If you have any quality, sell-able items to donate to this sale we’d be most appreciative!! We are looking for furniture, household items, athletic equipment, working electronics, artwork, toys, rugs or anything that could be a treasure to someone new!

We are asking for items that can be sold! If the things you have to donate are really worn out, please bring them to Goodwill instead of our sale. The trips to Goodwill at the end of our garage sales have been really big! Just do your best to consider the shape of the products you donate.

Goodwill does not take the following items. Please refrain from bringing them to our sale, as we will not be able to dispose of them if they do not sell.

  • Cribs
  • No household chemical products such as pesticides, paint, paint thinner, drain cleaner, oven cleaner, aerosols and other environmentally-unfriendly waste products.
  • No automotive hazardous waste such as tires, lead acid batteries, additives, gasoline, oils, antifreeze, etc.
  • No large appliances such as refrigerators, freezers, stoves/ovens, washers/dryers, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, furnaces, microwaves, trash compactors, water heaters, large console stereos, reon-based appliances, etc.
  • No personal care items such as shampoo, conditioner, nail polish remover, shaving cream, hairsprays, shavers, curling irons
  • No fragrance items
  • No mattresses/box springs, including waterbed mattresses and waterbed frames
  • No plumbing fixtures or building materials
  • No traditional recyclables such as glass, newsprint, office paper, cardboard, plastics, magazines, junk mail, etc.
  • No weapons such as guns, bows and arrows, ammunition, hunting knives, etc.
  • No cribs, car seats, walkers or other products that do not meet the current safety standards of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, including recalled items.

Drop off donated items from 6:30 - 8:30 Friday, March 29th in the WCS cafeteria. Students will be available to help you unload your donations. Contact Ted Milks at Tmilks@cvsdvt.org with questions. And THANK YOU  for your support!!

Yearbook Orders: To order online go to jostensyearbooks.com or print an order form using this Yearbook Order Form Please contact abeauregard@cvsdvt.org with any questions.

Meal Train For Matthew Yandow
  • 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!
Absent Student? Appointment? Change in Bus ride home?
  • 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:
                     cobrien@cvsdvt.org
                     amerrill@cvsdvt.org
                          jroof@cvsdvt.org
                      mquatt@cvsdvt.org

Please do not bring in food to share.  We have many food restrictions on house.  Thanks!

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IMPORTANT LINKS
 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

Ms.Q/ Mr. Sironi

CMP8
In math class this week we began with solving more real life examples of linear systems.  We took our bags with 60 candies of unknown amounts of skittles and jelly beans and using mass, we developed a linear system for the number of candies and the mass of the bag.  We then moved onto solving systems using a model called substitution and finished the week with solving linear models using combination and elimination.

CMP7

The 7th graders began solving ratios and proportions in relation to geometric figures that are scaled up and down and have missing sides.  We explored indirect measurement using shadows and mirrors.


We will finish up this unit when we return from break.

Science:

What is the science behind the phenomena of seasons, eclipses, phases of the moon and how do celestial bodies move in relation to each other.  Using models, balls and flashlights we reviewed what happens and why.  There was a lot of excellent discussion and pushed our thinking about the common misconceptions.

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Mr. Roof - 7&8 Humanities

This week in Humanities, students were busy with Reading Log 17, CNN 10, IXL, and The Treaty of Versailles to end World War I. With reading log 17, students are focused on using their cool words in their writing. This helps to reinforces the acquisition new vocabulary. Students were able to choose the type of writing they wanted to use, such as letter, poem, LEAF, etc.  Some students chose to write letters to the author, and letters between characters, which was pretty cool. In CNN 10 this week, students could choose between the US border funding disagreement, Nigerian election and crisis, Amazon's cancelled headquarters plan, and the Opportunity martian rover to write a short LEAF paragraph. The focus here is to make a claim and support it with evidence. Students are really coming along with choosing the best and most credible evidence to use in support of their claims! 

In IXL, students are all working on skill areas that are most needed for them, based on their individual diagnostic. Finally, this week we concluded our study of WWI by reading and responding to an article about the Treaty of Versailles and watching the film War Horse. The reading and response focused on the outcomes of the Treaty of Versailles and how it set the stage for WWII. Students needed to use text evidence to support their answers to each question. The film showed the reality of warfare along the Western Front in WWI.   

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Mr. Merrill - 5/6 Humanities

Reading Cafe:
Students read independently this week, updating their Reading Response Notebooks with book titles, me as a reader reflections, and tier 2 words.

Stock Market Game: We tried to answer a couple of questions that keep coming up - what causes the stock market to change and should we buy, sell, or hold.  We used real examples - Walmart vs. Kmart and other companies to try to explain causes of market change and identify when to buy, sell, or hold a stock. We also reflected and wrote about our stock market game experience to this point. We discussed some basic principles of economics:

  • People choose
  • People’s choices involve costs
  • People’s choices have consequences for the future
  • People respond to incentives 
  • People gain when they trade voluntarily (by choice)

We then made connections from these basic principles to the stock market game and our own lives.

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Ms. O’Brien Classes

5/6 Science:  We had a great week of wrapping up the gravity part of our unit.  Students analyze data collected at the rocket challenge last week, by graphing it, and predicted how much force would be needed for certain distances based on the story of the graphed data.  Students completed an On-Demand Writing Prompt to explain the Wile E. Coyote phenomenon from 4 weeks ago!  Students needed to use their understanding of gravity in order to answer what happened and why it happened.  See photos of the rubberband rocket challenge below.


























Math 5:   Fifth graders have made great progress in multi-digit multiplication this week.  We have different students leaning on different strategies which makes the unit a great one...each person chooses in at their level.  Our big transition this week was from base ten pieces, to base ten paper, to skeleton array, to area model, and for some to the standard algorithm.  We are in good shape for learning when we return from our winter break.
Math 6:  I have been super happy with the learning behaviors in the 6th grade math classroom.  Students have spent weeks building understanding of area, surface area, volume, and most recently decimal operations.  I think I can finally say that everyone in our classroom has reached one of the ultimate goals in math - the standard algorithm!  Students have used this to manage the new learning with decimals and it has been really impressive how persistent each person has been in this pursuit!  I think the 6th grade classroom is really a model best practices classroom.  Each student understands the expectations of learning, and much of this has come with the shared agreement to talk, share, push, persist, and see everyday as a challenge.  We worked on summarizing ideas this week and took a final assessment on geometry and a partial assessment on decimals (just multiplication).  We will get to decimal division after the break and then on to algebra!














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