UPCOMING EVENTS, NEWS, and REMINDERS
SBAC Testing Begins Monday April 29th - PLEASE READ!
All students will taking their SBAC tests the week of April 29th. Please ensure your child brings in a headphone. We have a limited supply. Earbuds are acceptable. Thank you!
Cell-Phone Use
Please refrain from texting your child during the day. If you need to communicate a message to your child, please contact Ted Milks (tmilks@cvddvt.org; 871-6148) and the Core Teacher. If your child does receive a text from you, please do not expect a response until the end of the school day. - Thank You!
Pencils
It’s that time of year when student’s start running low on pencils. Our supplies are limited so we encourage you to check in with your student to see if replenishing any of their school supplies is needed. Thanks!
SPARK Session 5 now open for registration
The following SPARK sessions are offered for Session 5:
Creative Cooking - Sally Dattilio & JoAnne Conroy
Nutrition & Health - Say he ler & Amanda Laberge
Gardening - Colleen O'Brien & Ted Milks
SketchUp - Ellen Arapakos & Jamie Lewis
Card Club - Tyler Mello
Disc Golf - Dan Johnson
Hip-Hop & Zumba - Lauren Drasler
Click here for descriptions of the session offered.
Click the Registration Form to sign up your child.
2019 CVU Spring Social Dance for 8th Graders
With cooperation from all the CVSD middle schools, CVU is proud to announce the 4th Annual “Spring Social,” an event meant to bring together the CVU Class of 2023 before the end of eighth grade. Click here for more information.
Please visit the Voyager Web Site to keep in touch with what’s happening in Voyager this year.
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
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
Congratulations to Peter Hillmuth for having his letter selected for the KET News Quiz!
Ms. Quatt- Math/Science
Wow! What an eventful week we have had with the 7th/8th grade engineers and the WCS Engineering Challenge. On Monday, students began work on researching, building and testing ramps and catapults to land on a variety of different distances. After the first day, students began testing their solutions, collected data, tweaked their models and began the process all over again. Students were also asked to make claims about their solution based on their data. What happens when you change the angle of the catapult lever? What happens to the distance a ball rolls when you increase the angle of the ramp? On Thursday morning we had the school wide competition.
Voyager had many students who made the final competition. In ramp ball, Ada Jones and Addison Urch, Brianna Armstrong and Shelby Companion had stellar performances in the preliminary competition and moved onto the finals. In the catapult competition, Gabriella Clark who was missing her partner Bella Trasciatti-Holmberg, Anna Arosovsky, Zorah Ngu and missing team member Tyler Davis, and Ava Barron, who was also missing her team members Mia White and Noah Healy all made it to the finals. Every team forged on despite the loss of their team members! This perseverance paid off with the 2nd place award in the catapult competition going to Ava, Mia and Noah and the 1st place award in catapult going to Anna, Zorah and Tyler. Yes, Voyager House has won the “bragging rights” for this school year! Kudos to all for the hard work!
Mr. Roof - 7&8 Humanities:
This week, our main focus across house was the Science and Engineering task. Students had time to work in their groups multiple days in support of their amazing machines. In Humanities, we looked at a letter from WWII U.S. Lt. Cmdr Shea to his five year old son. Shea was killed when his aircraft carrier was sunk by Japanese torpedos. Students read the letter and then responded in writing. They wrote about American ideals, honor, and duty. Students were very insightful. Additionally, we looked at WWII propaganda posters and examined them using the tricks that we learned about
Mr. Merrill - 5/6 Humanities:
On Monday, I finished my portion of the Revolutionary War unit by giving the students the opportunity to create a book review of the historical fiction book they read over the past few weeks. Students seemed to appreciate getting their voices heard, and it was excellent feedback for me as well. Thank you for your support during my solo unit! It was an amazing experience, and I’m so excited to spend the rest of the school-year with your students. - Lauren Drasler
This week we reviewed and practiced some of the important reading and writing skills that students will likely use on the SBAC test.
Stock Market Game Results
We had several teams end up in the top ten. Congratulations to Emily, Molly, and Cheyenne for winning the state competition!
Elementary:
1 VT_50_A291 $109,677.01 Williston Central School Merrill, Aron
2 VT_50_A178 $107,217.06 Stowe Elementary School Rapoport, Michael
3 VT_50_A295 $107,002.81 Williston Central School Merrill, Aron
The S&P closed at 2907 on Friday, up about one half percent for the week. This was the third consecutive week of gains. When the Stock Market Game opened Feb 4, the S&P was at 2707, so it rose by 200 points or 7.4% over the past ten weeks. Not too many teams did that well, but they should not despair. It is very hard to beat the market.
The top elementary school team was Team A291, from Williston coached by Aron Merrill. They did well with AMZN, another popular company, and CMG, Chipolte Mexican Grill.
Ms. O’Brien
Math 5 and Science: We dedicated our math week to finishing up some lingering work on fractions and building and testing our catapult and ball ramp engineering solutions. I overmathematized the engineering tasks so that students would generate a fair amount of data during testing, in order to build solid data collection and analysis skills. With the constraint of only one week to design, build, test, and improve, students came up with some pretty good solutions.
We also reviewed the SBAC platform and viewed some items on the practice test, as a reminder of how the platform works and the kinds of questions we might see on the test.
*Special math kuddos to Katie, who tested and tested and tested her catapult, recording her data carefully and comprehensively. Nice work Katie!
Math 6 and Science: We spent a few half classes reviewing ideas of terms, coefficients, variables, factors, and creating expressions with the fewest number of terms. In the example below, we can combine the m’s and the y’s and the constants with each other, but cannot then combine y’s to m’s. So we state them separately, leaving an expression with three terms.
We will return to this work after the SBAC testing and then finish the year with some Data and Statistics work. Students are doing very well with the expressions and equations aspect of our unit.
For the rest of our class periods this week we worked to build and test our catapult and ball ramp engineering solutions. I overmathematized the engineering tasks so that students would generate a fair amount of data during testing, so as to build solid data collection and analysis skills. With the constraint of only one week to design, build, test, and improve, students came up with some pretty good solutions.
We also reviewed the SBAC platform and viewed some items on the practice test, as a reminder of how the platform works and the kinds of questions we might see on the test.
*Special math kuddos to Kady, who did multiple trials for her catapult and then by hand, averaged all of her data.
Engineering Challenge: What a messy week! I was so happy to get the vacuum out yesterday! We had a great day of competition! See pictures below.
Highlights!
Luke and Chloe: Finalists for the catapult
Ayden, Daisy, and Avery: Finalists for ballramp
Kyle and Mackenzie: Third Place for the ballramp
Chase and Maggie C.: Winners of the ballramp
