Friday, October 12, 2018

Week of October 8th - 12th

UPCOMING EVENTS, NEWS, and REMINDERS

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

  • PARENT/TEACHER CONFERENCES - check your email for an invitation to sign up for a time slot.
    • 5/6: Monday Oct. 15th and Friday Oct. 19th.  
    • 7/8: Friday Oct. 19th and Friday Oct. 26th. No school on the 19th.
  • FUN NIGHT!
    • Friday, October 26th for grades K-5.
    • Pre-registration forms are available with the link below or the front office. 
    • Pre-registration forms will be picked up at noon on Friday, October 26th, after that time payment will at the front door only.
  • 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/
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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CLASSROOM UPDATES
Ms. Q
CMP8
This week in math class we took our Linear Model Assessment.  Students took their time, showed their thinking and results will be available on Jumprope over the next few days. We have begun our new book “Thinking With Mathematical Models” with several experiments involving paper bridges.  We create a span and tested thickness of paper layers and its ability to handle the mass of pennies. The second experiment we did was change the length of the bridge across the span and again tested its ability to hold up to mass.  We compared our outcomes and began seeing the difference between linear and non-linear models.
CMP7
We finished up our “Accentuate the Negative” unit with looking at the Order of Operation and the Distributive Property.  We practiced number sentences with playing cards and learned about a visual model to show the distributive property.
We learned the factored of this model which is 6( x + 4)  and expanded form which is 6x + 24. We even tried one that was a little more advanced.
We completed our week with creating class records and preparing for our unit assessment next week.
Science
This week in science we reviewed our materials and took our summative on Newton’s 3 Laws.  Students were asked to connect their lab experiments with each of Newton’s laws. They had to draw diagrams, analyze data, create graphs and create claim and evidence statements.  We finished the week with introducing our engineering task and doing background research on mousetraps.

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Mr. Roof 7&8 Humanities
Lots of great writing happening this week!  Students are using all of their knowledge, quotes, and facts to craft LEAF responses to their choice of the following two prompts: Who would you vote for and why?  OR  Which candidate is the best for the office of _____ and why?  Students were able to use RETNs excellent footage as a resource too, which was exciting to see, since our students were filmed asking questions. We specifically worked on writing hooks and establishing claims, in addition to the other components. We also worked on independent reading, trying to establish a goal of at least 30 minutes/day. Reading log 3 supported this, which is due on Monday. Students also worked on IXL, geography skills, and CNN 10.

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Ms. O’Brien’s 5/6 Classes
  • Math 5:  Students wrapped up the first unit of the year by reviewing key concepts and taking the unit assessment!  Two targets were assessed, geometric reasoning and using operations and symbols. I was especially pleased by the student’s persistence with the assessment which took most, a full class period.  I scored the assessment and students have made corrections and done a reflection. In addition, post assessment questions were administered to those students who met the target to expand understanding and help me to know their preparedness for operations and expressions with abstractions, like letters to represent numbers.  Assessments will be shared at conferences. We also came back to a problem from last week that was algebraic in nature, and worked on this Friday.
  • Math 6:  Students worked on correcting assessments from the halfway point of the unit and then continued to work on ratio reasoning by making a return to fractions and decimals. We modeled most of our reasoning this week on number lines, to help us compare and order numbers by magnitude.  Introductions to language like, rational numbers, irrational numbers, absolute value, positive and negative numbers, and a return to language we already know, mixed, proper, and improper fractions, will allow us to talk more clearly about what we know about numbers. Claims were made about numbers on the number line that will help us especially with the negative side of the number line, which can be really confusing to students!  
  • Science ⅚ :  We dug in further to our ideas about photosynthesis this week engaging in an investigation about, of all things, roofs!  We used model houses to measure the changing temperature of two roofs, one shingled and the other, grass, in order to compare black roofs with green roofs.  The goal was to further seek understanding of the importance of plants to our planet. We collected data every two minutes for 28 minutes, with both the light on (our sun) and the light off (night).  We measured the exterior and interior temperatures of the houses and graphed the results. Some interesting data was collected. We will analyze our graphs next week so that we can make another claim about plants.  * We will be reviewing the IPCC’s report on climate change next week and drafting letters to our legislators as a writing project. If you see newspaper or magazine articles about the report, please feel free to send them in.  We will be reading a few article about climate change and want a variety of resources.
Mr. Merrill's 5/6 Humanities:
This week we dove into our LEAF writing - answering the question,  "Who would you vote for and why?" Students had to use evidence from the candidate forum, which meant they had to pick a candidate, listen to his/her responses to the questions, and record the best answers. If you would like to see the candidate forum it is available.
Williston Central School Candidate Forum

We did some reflection on our last LEAF essay. Students received their first scores and reflected on their work and made a goal for their next LEAF essay.

We started our Mystery and Spook Unit. 5th grade students are reading “Closed for the Season” and 6th grade students are reading “Coraline”. Students have weekly reading assignments and work to complete in their reading response notebook. We will be working on mapping the setting and the characters of these books. Students can also look for tier 2 words to add to their ongoing lists in their reading response notebooks.



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Friday, October 5, 2018

Week of October 1st - 5th

UPCOMING EVENTS, NEWS, and REMINDERS


  • WCS Picture Make-up Day - Friday, October 12

  • PARENT/TEACHER CONFERENCES - check your email for an invitation to sign up for a time slot.
    • 5/6: Monday Oct. 15th and Friday Oct. 19th.  
    • 7/8: Friday Oct. 19th and Friday Oct. 26th. No school on the 19th.

  • FUN NIGHT!
    • Friday, October 26th for grades K-5.
      • Pre-registration forms are available with the link below or the front office.
      • Pre-registration forms will be picked up at noon on Friday, October 26th, after that time payment will at the front door only.


  • Yearbook Cover Contest!!
    • Contest for students to design this year's yearbook cover. Click on the picture below for details.


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


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.

  • 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


  • 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.


Ms Q.
CMP8
This week in class we had some fun openers.  We played an intense round of “24”, a game where you have to create a mathematical expression that equals 24.  Numbers may only be used once and you may use any and all operations. We also were introduced to some neat visual models for solving algebraic equations.  These openers may become regular fixtures in our classroom. We completed our beautifully crafted class records and practiced finding line of best fit, finding equations from points, graphs and tables.  We will be having our assessment on Monday.
CMP7
This week was all about “love”, that is the “love triangle” of multiplying/dividing positive and negative integers.  This diagram and our sassy sayings “if you love to love you love” allowed us find the products of signed numbers. We played a very strategic product integer game and we proved Zach’s conjecture of multiplying strings of positive and negative numbers.  

Science
Students received their first graded lab this week.  We reviewed some specific strategies for writing claim and evidence statements, constructing responses and attending to all the details needed in writing up experiment results.  We got out the carts and began testing equal and opposite forces and pushed our thinking on how rockets move.

Math 5:  As we wrap up our first unit on multiplication, students have been practicing multiplication in a number of formats.  Students dug back into rectangular prisms this week, learning how to efficiently multiply the area of the base x the height.  We worked on reestablishing the importance of the first floor in this pursuit. If students can see how many cubes are on the first floor, then multiply by the number of stories in the building, then you can find the volume of the building.  I have been avoiding this term, volume, but have told students that we have officially renamed the “number of cubic offices”, chocolates, baseballs, or ping pong balls. So the volume is the inside space inside a rectangular prism, and our expression to match this is (l x w) x h.  We have also reviewed expression writing for dot patterns and cube patterns as well as put into action decision making around which ‘in your head’ math strategy might work for a given multiplication problem. See photos of multiplication strategies.




Math 6:  We took two assessments this week.  The first was on whole number multiplication and division.  My hope is that all students have moved to standard algorithm at this point, but this doesn’t look to be true!  Please feel free to follow the “old way” rules of multiplication and division at home for some extra practice. I would love for this to be a done deal and will obviously keep working on this here at school. Our second assessment was on the ratio reasoning aspect of our book Comparing Bits and Pieces.  Because ratios require multiplicative reasoning, students still struggling to see number relationships and 0-12 fluency, may still be missing the mark. I will have final assessments in by Sunday evening, and the corrected assessments (that have already been viewed and corrected by students) on Monday. I am hoping that students saw their mistakes and have made some solid gains on the target.  

Science 5/6:  We did some leaf chemistry this week and learned that even though a red leaf has changed from green to red, there is still some green pigment in the leaf!  Where there is green, there is photosynthesis happening. We had some interesting and surprising results. We also read about photosynthesis and introduced modeling of molecules in the photosynthesis.  We ended our week singing the photosynthesis song and reviewing our plant structure quiz.

Humanities 5/6

  • Students are writing a Social Justice LEAF as a follow up to our first literature group. The big question is “How does one promote a just society?”. Students searched for evidence of injustices in their book and analyzed what someone can do to make the world a better place.
  • We finished the candidate forum posters. Students watched the forum via a live feed from RETN. Next week they will be using the responses from the candidates to come to some decisions about the upcoming election and student vote in November. Here are some pictures of our posters:



Mr. Roof 7&8 Humanities

We had an amazing end to our week here. As you may have seen from Mr. Merrill's update and photos, we had a candidates forum today. Nine candidates (and one candidate's wife!) came to the forum and answered student generated questions in a very civil, informative forum. Voyager was lucky enough to have students run cameras, lead the pledge of allegiance, and ask amazing questions to our candidates. A big shout out to our own Mr. Merrill for being the lead organizer of the event, and the moderator. Job well done. To prepare for this event, students crafted questions based on their research of candidate's and offices. Students also continued their work with civics and social responsibility by playing an online simulation game, titled "Win the White House." and by completing work involving the rights and responsibilities of citizens in all levels of our lives: Country, state, city, school, etc. In addition, we continued our work with summary writing and explaining author's word choice.

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