SBAC Testing Begins Monday 4/29 - PLEASE READ!
All students will be 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@cvsdvt.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!
Garage Sale Success!
Thank you again to all our volunteers and donors for making this year’s indoor garage sale fundraiser a great success. We raised over $1700 that will go directly towards defraying the costs of our year-end overnight field trip.
The 19th Annual FAP Big Basket Raffle & Silent Auction…
...is THIS Saturday! Saturday, April 13th at Williston Central School in the Cafeteria. Doors open at 6pm! We have over 60 themed baskets being raffled off containing hundreds of items brought in by families and donated by area businesses, along with 25 Silent Auction items. Our baskets have been wrapped with care, but we could still use some help with set up, food donations, and event specific tasks.Please go to this to link: https://signup.com/go/vgYmbuw and sign up! We hope to see you on Saturday! And don’t forget to bring non-perishable items to the Basket Raffle for the Williston Community Food Shelf; those who do will receive up to 5 free raffle tickets!!!
Fun Night @ WCS (concurrent with the FAP Basket Raffle)
Drop off your child(ren) (Grades K - 5) at the Swift House Fun Night. An evening of adult supervised fun that supports the Swift House end of year field trip to Washington, D.C.Click here for more information and the registration form.
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
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.
FAP’s Annual Fund Needs Your Help
Click here to learn more.
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:
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.Sironi - 7/8 math and science
Hello Voyager families,
What a week this has been. First warm then cool. First sunny then… not. A special thanks again to all of the families who donated to our BBQ basket raffle. Our raffle is Saturday!
In 7th grade math this week, we have been working on using ratios and proportions to solve real world problems. Students are starting to find information in word problems and real world scenarios to create proportions and find solutions. We have started working with ratio tables and have graphed them on a coordinate grid.
In 8th grade we have finished our investigations on geometric symmetry and transformations. We have explored reflections, rotations, translations, and dilations. We are starting to combine these transformations to form different geometric patterns. For example, we are translating a shape on a grid and then dilating it to be twice the size.
In science, we have come to the end of our environmental interactions unit. The students took the concepts and ideas we had generated over the past two weeks and used them to analyze and conjecture about a real world example of habitat loss or over-hunting. Students looked at either the Amazon Rainforest, the Coral Triangle, or the Arctic.
Next Monday we will be starting our engineering tasks. We will be spending all day on Monday, and Tuesday/Wednesday afternoons to build and test our solutions. Voyager 7th/8th grade will compete against other houses on Thursday. Students are in groups of 2-3 and are working on either a ramp ball or a catapult.
Friday also marked the end of my solo time in Voyager. I have learned so much over the past two weeks. The students have given me some great feedback to help me keep growing in the future.
Mr. Merrill - 5/6 Humanities:
In our afternoon classes, we have been working on a 4-part mapping activity to highlight major historical transitions in North America leading up to colonial times. The first map labels the migration routes of the first Americans, the second tracks European exploration and land claims, the third will highlight the results of the French and Indian war, and the final map will focus on the 13 colonies. With each map, we are reading a play or role playing the historical events that led to these transitions.
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5/6 Morning Humanities with Ms. Drasler
During the second week of my solo unit about the Revolutionary War, students began to explore the concept of a story map. Story mapping is a tool that students can use as a guide to better identify interesting themes, conflicts and resolutions in their novels. We have also continued to work in our literature circle groups. By working in smaller groups, students can collaborate with their peers to better understand their texts and discuss what they are reading together. My portion of this unit will conclude on Monday, April 15th. While this will bring an end to my solo unit in 5th and 6th grade humanities, I am excited to continue working with your students as the year continues.5/6 Science with Ms. Drasler
This week, our primary focus in the Forces and Motion science unit has been on Isaac Newton and his Three Laws of Motion. On Monday, students read a text and identified the main ideas surrounding Newton’s Laws. During long block on Wednesday and Thursday, students were able to use their newfound knowledge of Newton’s Laws to take a more in-depth look at some of the activities they participated in last week during our inquiry circus. This unit will conclude on Friday, April 12th. Though I am ending my solo unit in 5th and 6th grade science, I am looking forward to continuing to work with all your students for the remainder of the year.
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Ms. O’Brien
Math 5: We have been really pounding the fractions pavement this week! Students have been working really really hard on fraction addition and subtraction, securing great strategies for operating with fractions. We used the Start With, Go By strategy to practice finding a common denominator and this has really helped a lot of students understand how to find equivalent fractions with like denominators.
We finished our week with a quick quiz and the launch of our Engineering Challenge. Students were assigned partners and a design challenge and spent some math time working collaboratively on the solution. The school-wide competition where students in ⅚ will present solutions is on Wednesday morning in the Auditorium. If you would like to come, you are welcome. Presentations of solutions will begin at 10:30 am. We will not have specific times for each team, so come enjoy all of them!
Math 6: Students in 6th grade math have been presented with a lot of new learning this week. We have fully entered the world of abstract math while learning all about algebraic expressions. Specifically we are working on understanding of terms, factors, and coefficients in an algebraic expression. This understanding has led us to combining like terms, simplifying algebraic expressions, and ultimately distributive property (part 2!).
This work is ultimately in service to learning how to write equations for sets of data, visual patterns, etc. I think this is challenging for many, to work in math situations where the answer is not really an answer at all (a solution like 2t - 3 is very unsatisfying!)! Students are handling this new challenge. We have also switched over to Khan, which does a nice job working with this content. Please know that the 50 min/week math expectation is still in place, but on the Khan platform.
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