Week of May 21

NYC Information Meeting

⅞ students received their packing lists, expectation forms and reviewed the itinerary for the trip today at their meeting.  Please review the packing list and itinerary with your student and start preparing for the trip.

End of the Year Stuff...

• Please remind your student to return all library books before the end of the school year.
• Please settle all cafeteria accounts before the end of the school year.

Ms. Q’s Corner

7th Grade Math

Students created Stem/Leaf and Box and Whisker Plots  to explore a visual representation of how data is spread.  Students learned about five number summaries which include the mean, median, quartile 1, quartile 3, the maximum and minimum number. These data points are utilized to create box and whisker plots. We finished out our week with exploring what happens to our measures of center when data is added or moved around in our data set.  We completed the Data Distribution Unit Test and students were given a common assessment review packet in preparation for next Friday’s CSSU Math Common Assessment.

8th Grade Math

We moved our thinking from finding the area and side lengths of squares to  finding the area and side lengths of right triangles. Students found the missing legs and hypotenuse  of right triangles.  We practiced with radicals and learned how to simplify them by factoring out numbers that are perfect squares.  Next week there will be two math assessments.  On Tuesday we will have the Looking for Pythagoras Unit Test and on Friday we will have the Algebra Final or the 8th Grade CSSU Math Common Assessment.

Science 7th/8th

Our science class directed it energies toward building, designing and creating drawings, models and prototypes for the 7th/8th grade Economics project.  Students created step-by-step directions and  wrote environmental impact statements that will be placed with their models for their presentations.  Students will receive a separate science grade for this portion of their project.

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Language Arts and Social Studies Wrap Up

In Language Arts we wrapped up our read aloud books.  Each class had a letter writing assignment that connected with the book.  In Number the Stars, students wrote a letter to Israeli Authorities, recommending Annemarie for a medal, based on her heroic acts.  For Tuck Everlasting, students took on the character of Winnie, writing to the Tucks about her life after meeting them, as she never saw them again after helping with the escape.  

Students started creating their own businesses in Social Studies this week.  We followed a brainstorming process to come up with ideas for products or services.  Students focused on trying to solve a problem and fixing it or combining favorite things to do this.  Students will be working on their business plans next week and will create an electronic poster to design and present their new business product or service.

The Week in Ms. O’s

5th Grade Math:  Working our way through decimals...we have discovered the key to understanding decimals!  It’s place value.  What is the value of a numeral in a number?  It is it’s location to other numbers.  The decimals becomes terribly important because it is yet another place value marker that sorts out our place values.  Students took a quick quiz on place value names and are working on addition and subtraction of decimals in addition to understanding magnitude when looking at a set of fractions, decimals, and percents.  End of Unit test is coming...

6th Grade:  We have completed our unit on operations with fractions.  Students received assessments back to correct, as fluency errors again were the cause of some shaky results.  Don’t forget to practice multiplication and division at home!  We have moved into operations with decimals which is once again practice in computation fluency.  Our last unit in algebra will begin next week!

⅚ Science:  We are still wrapping up podcasts but have moved on to our unit in ecology. We dissected an owl pellet this week and read about owls as a way to begin conversations about food chains, food webs and conservation of mass and energy.  We will move onto to a variety of simulations re: predator prey and then onto adaptations!

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room:

7/8 Language Arts: With the 8th graders we continued our read aloud. Students seem to be really enjoying the story and are really engaged in our conversations and in-class discussions. The 7th graders finished their great review of punctuation and developed a list of punctuation rules/guidelines for writing success! Our 7th graders will be put to the ultimate punctuation challenge on Tuesday morning!

7/8 Social Studies: This week our Business Convention Project received a major boost by teaming up with Ms. Q in Science. Students are making some great prototypes and models and seem to be having a lot of fun with the construction portion of this project. It has been so fun to see their ideas come to life!

Week of May 17

FAPAC May Meeting Highlights Information

REMINDER:  If you've signed up to bring a Desert in for Teacher Appreciation, please drop off in lobby on Friday morning!!!  Thank you!!!!

The FAP Advisory Council held its final monthly meeting of this school year on May 9th.  Check the full minutes and our approved 2013-2014 FAPAC budget in a PDF format by clicking HERE.  Below are a few meeting highlights:

• School Budget Approved on May 7th
• Last Day of School Changed to June 18th, which will be a half-day
• Placement Letters should be mailed by early June.  Parent information nights for transitioning students are scheduled as follows:  4th to 5th grade parents on May 22nd from 6:30 to 8 pm in the WCS Auditorium; and 2nd to 3rd grade parents on June 4th at 6:30 pm in the WCS Auditorium.
• 1 to 1 Initiative--there is an interesting video recently shown at a Rotary Club meeting about 1 to 1 programs.  Please check it out on the school website's school information area under 1 to 1 information or at this link HERE.
• On June 1st, the Williston Run for Education  will take place (a Fun Run for kids as well as a timed 5K).  Flyers have been in the School Bell, sent home in folders or via email.  Register on-line by going to www.willistonruns.org.   For more event information, contact Sue Scheer at sue@willistonruns.org.  Volunteers are also needed to run this event so if you can help, please go to this LINK.
• There is a Williston Day at the Lake Monsters being planned for July 7th!  Ticket information has been sent home either in folders or by email; has been in the School Bell; and is available at upcoming school events.  Tickets can be turned in for other dates if you are unavailable on July 7th.  Time is running out.  Sales end on May 24th.

NYC Update:

Chaperone Meeting (Voyager Kiva) on Tuesday, May 21st at 6:30!!

Math 7

Which hand has a faster reaction rate and which genders’  reactions are faster in an online reaction rate test.  We gathered a large amount of personal data, created value ordered bar graphs, explored the measures of center(mean, mode and median) and created line plots of the classwide data on reaction rate.  Clearly, we had some unexpected variables such as the post play lethargy.  Interestingly enough, student data showed that the variability of reaction rate between male and female was quite narrow.  Surprisingly some students found that they were much faster with their non-dominant hand then their dominant hand.  We ended the week with creating box and whisker plots.

Math 8

Math was impacted by  the 8th grade science NECAP testing. This week we continued to explore finding the side length of squares from the area and finding the area of a square from the side lengths using squares on the diagonal.  Students were given an entrance task and check-up this week on their use of square roots. We finished off the week with Pythagorean Jeopardy game.

Science 7th/8th  

Our focus this week was on writing a clear and precise conclusion statement for a scientific inquiry.  Our testable question was: "Which solvent (water, hydrogen peroxide and alcohol)  will dissolve the solute (salt) best?' Students performed the experiment and recorded the time it took for the solute to dissolve.  From their results we used a modified LEAF format to write a conclusion.   

We watched a TED Ed talk by Jill Tater  from S.E.T.I. ( Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). We learned about the Drake Equation and how scientists are looking at different constraints such as number of stars, planetary systems around stars, those that are within the “Goldilocks Zone” and other factors  to calculate the probability of life in our galaxy.  We had a rousing discussion about our beliefs that there is other life and where our beliefs originate.    We explored the message that Voyager 1 and 2 has sent to the outer reach of space and read an article on our quest to find signals from space.    

Next week students have a combined science and social studies period to engineer a prototype of their product.  Students will be asked to bring recycled material, odds and ends from home to help supplement materials at school.

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Language Arts: This week in language arts we started to wrap-up our Independent Reading Monday’s. Most students really enjoyed having time in school to read a book of their choice. Some students even found that through independent reading Mondays they were able to develop (wait for it) a LOVE for reading. Once students were able to find a genre or author they enjoyed, they were able to develop a love for the activity of reading. As the week continued our schedule had a few shifts due to 8th grade Science NECAPS. The 7th graders were given time to do some journal writing, and we also had a FANTASTIC 8th Grade Challenge brainstorm sessions. All of the students found this very helpful, and over the 2 days most students said they had an idea of what their 8th Grade Challenge is going to be. We also took time this week to work on our Business Convention projects. We focused on the Sales Pitch this week, and talked about how to hook an audience and what a sales pitch should look like. To end the week 8th Graders started their 8th Grade Read Aloud which will be of the book “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom. As we read the book students will be taking part in some entrance tasks/mini quizzes, and they will also be asked to participate in short or long discussions to analyze the text, word choice, and author’s voice. 7th graders began their short grammar challenge which we will continue at the start of next week!

7/8 Social Studies: This week our classes started off with our usual current event run-down on Monday which ended up sparking a great classwide debate trying to answer the question: What is more important, the economy or the environment? This debate started after we read an article about what fracking is and the pros and cons to fracking. On Tuesday while the 8th graders were taking their Science Necaps the 7th graders continued with this topic by developing and participating in a lengthy and heated full debate. As our week continued we worked on and discussed the writing piece that was due today for the Business Convention project, which was about labor regulations. Students were given an outline with expectations, and were also provided time in class to work on this. We also looked at specific websites and talked through much of the heavy language that is included in labor regulations around the globe. The project is moving forward well, and we are all looking forward to next week when we team up with science to begin building prototypes and/or working on our official product drawings!

News from Ms. O

Math 5:  Students spent the week investigating the base ten place value system and how it helps us understand fractions and decimals.  We have transitioned from fractions to decimals in this logical way so that we can understand how to rename fractions as decimals, especially when the denominator is not a factor of 10, 100, 1000, etc.  Students are moving into addition and subtraction of decimals next week.

Math 6:  Students are wrapping up Bits II by confirming their skills in fraction operations.  Students will be working on a decimal skills unit next week to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide decimals. The positive thing about this next unit is that we are back to practicing our computational fluency.

⅚ Science:  Students took the final Beyond Earth assessment this week and will begin an ecology unit to finish the rest of the year.  We will dissect an owl pellet Monday, a task that students have done before, but one that will be critical to understand given the food chain GE’s for 5th and 6th grade.

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up

Next week marks the final week of literature groups for our school year.  Students have been reading fantasy books and will be writing a final LEAF paper that will be due on Wednesday.  The focus question for the paper is “How does the real world parallel the fantasy world in your book?”

5th graders continued their in class read aloud of Number the Stars, discussing and journaling about bravery and the dilemmas that occurred when people had to lie in order to protect the lives of others in WWII.  In Tuck Everlasting, 6th grade students have been discussing and journaling about the desire to live forever and whether or not this would be a good thing.  

In Social Studies, we continued to work on our economic word maps.  Once students completed the maps, students used their expertise during a concentric circle activity, to teach others the meaning and concepts that are associated with the word.   Students then created a skit to showcase these economic terms.  Next week in Language Arts, students will be studying media literacy, and in Social Studies, we will begin our final economics project.

                                                                                                    

Week of May 7

⅞ New York City Field Trip Reminders

• We are asking that the final payment and the permission slip/medical form for the NYC trip be brought to school by Friday, May 17th. Checks should be made out to Williston Central School.  If you need more time or financial support (some scholarship support is available), please do not hesitate to let us know.   Cost is $255 for students and the same for chaperones.  See the letter/itinerary for details.  Contact Aron Merrill - amerrill@cssu.org or Lauren Wesnak lwesnak@cssu.org  if you have any questions.

• If you have volunteered to be a chaperone, there is a field trip meeting scheduled for Tuesday, May 21st @ 6:30pm.  We ask that all chaperones attend this meeting so that we may discuss chaperone responsibilities, student behavior expectations, communication, packing lists, academic responsibilities and the final itinerary.  The meeting will be held in the Voyager Kiva.  Parents are welcome to attend.  All students going on the field trip will have a similar meeting during the school day.

Pictures of the 5/6 Science Day in the Field

We apologize for not highlighting the wonderfulness students presented last week on their day of tree planting and ecological investigations at the Winooski delta.  Enjoy the photos below!

This Week in Ms. O’s Class

Math 5

Thank you to parents who joined up for the Tour of Learning.  If you enjoyed this opportunity please let you core teacher know and we will try to make that happen more regularly next year.

I’m so proud of so many students who took the fluency challenge seriously!  The 5th graders have made huge progress.  I will report those scores so that we can all enjoy and celebrate the success and efforts of these students!  There is always work to do…Keep up the 4x a week efforts on      

Students have just finished a quick quiz on equivalent fractions and addition and subtraction of fractions.  Our new mathematical adventures include renaming fractions as decimals and adding and subtracting them.

Math 6

Thank you to parents who joined up for the Tour of Learning.  If you enjoyed this opportunity please let you core teacher know and we will try to make that happen more regularly next year.

We began work on division of fractions by looking at problems like 12 divide 1/3, 12 divide 2/3, 12 divide 5/3 to ask questions like, what is similar?  How will the resulting quotient compare?  Students will be playing with multiple strategies for division that will move them again, towards a generalization.

Fluency scores were up for 3rd trimester, but many still need the practice of FASTT Math and flashcards.  Don’t discount the value of an app or a five minute practice each day.  I hope that 6th graders move to Ms. Q with competency in math fluency.

Science 5/6

Students finished up podcast scripts this weekend and will be recording them next week.  Most are in good shape and ready to go!  Students are reviewing for a final assessment on the Solar System concepts including gravity, moon phases, solar and lunar eclipses, and why the sun and moon appear to be the same size in the sky.

Please enjoy the photos from our trips last week!

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up

⅚ Language Arts and Social Studies

This week each grade started an in class read aloud.  The 5th graders will be reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and the 6th graders will be reading Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.  Each class will be journaling and using their reading response notebooks throughout the read aloud, working on reading comprehension and vocabulary skills as we go.   

In Social Studies, students started working on word maps.  Students take a word related to the topic of study (economics), and map out the word, often finding many connections along the way.  Maps include definitions, facts, examples, sentences and visuals.  We will use these words to create skits and find deeper meaning and connections with all of our vocabulary for this unit.  

This week we say a fond farewell  to our graduate intern Ms. Cooper.  Over the year she has become an integral part of our teaching team.   Ms. Cooper has made meaningful connections with our students and shared her fun and witty personality with all of us. We wish her  well in her future educational ventures!

Math 7

We began this week with our new CMP unit “Data Distributions”  This book investigates measures of center, various statistical representations and the concepts of variability.  The 7th graders explored mean, median, mode,  line plots and value ordered bar graphs this week.. We looked at an assortment of  data it see if it was clustered or spread apart.   We talked about human error in recording data and the Law of Large Numbers.

Math 8

This week we continued our explorations in our “Looking for Pythagoras” unit.  Students reviewed concepts of square roots and utilized  their estimating  skills to find the square roots of non-perfect squares.  We investigated finding the area of a circle within a square and finding the area of squares that are on the diagonal.   All these examples help demonstrate how and why the Pythagorean theorem is used.

Science 7th/8th

We completed our presentations of our alien postcards.  We have found the more we study space, the more questions come up.  We began watching the Nova series on “Origins” to answer the question: What conditions were needed to form life on our planet?  Next week 8th graders will be participating in the Science NECAP test.  Tuesday we will have two session and Wednesday we will complete the assessment.  8th graders will need to get a good night sleep, have water and a good book for when they are done.  Snacks will be provided.  

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room

First off, I just want to say how AMAZING the “Annie” show was! It was so wonderful to see so many of our Voyager students put on such a beautiful and fun performance. Best of luck to them over the weekend!!

7/8 Language Arts: This week in Language Arts we started off with our Independent Reading Monday for 7th graders, and the 8th graders had a work day for their 8th Grade Challenge projects. We also took some time to work on our Business Convention projects. Students were able to brainstorm with each other and teachers, and get a great amount of work done. We then got back into our routine with journal writing and wrote in a variety of ways, with various time limits. As the week came to a close we showcased our PhotoStory memoirs and had a bit of fun with vocabulary through playing the game “Zip”.

7/8 Social Studies: This week we had our first run with Silver-Lining News on Monday and then jumped right back into our economics unit. We began building up our knowledge of our economic vocabulary and also watched more CNN Student News coverage due to their stories on our country’s current economic status. Students were given multiple class periods to work on their vocabulary maps, and these will be their final vocabulary maps of the year! We finished up the week by learning about “supply and demand” through a brief video and interactive quiz.

I also just want to take a second to say how AMAZING the “Annie” show was! It was so wonderful to see so many of our Voyager students put on such a beautiful and fun performance. Best of luck to them over the weekend and congratulations on such a wonderful show!

Week of April 29

Voyager House Spring Showcase!

Next Friday May 10th Voyager will be opening our doors to you, our Voyager families! Our students have been doing such amazing work over the course of this year that it is time share what has been going on in our classrooms. Between 8:30 and 9:30 families are invited to take a walk through Voyager and take a look at some of our projects. We will have coffee and juice available. Be sure to bring headphones to plug into our computers because some of our projects include audio :).

Looking forward to seeing you!

-Voyager Teachers and Staff

⅞ New York City Field Trip

Final cost letters with an attached itinerary were sent home with students today.   Please review the letter and itinerary this weekend.  Packing lists, evening activity schedule and other information will be coming home in the next few weeks.  Final payment for the trip will be due on Friday, May 17th.  

• The parent chaperone meeting has been rescheduled for Tuesday, May 21st at 6:30pm.  We ask that all chaperones attend this meeting so that we may discuss chaperone responsibilities, student behavior expectations, communication, packing lists, academic responsibilities and the final itinerary.  The meeting will be held in the Voyager Kiva.  Parents are welcome to attend.  

Ms. Q’s Corner

Math 7

This week students finished constructing cylinders.  We compared and contrasted the volume and surface area of cylinders with rectangular and triangular prisms.  Practicing with circumference, area,  and volume, students performed multi-step problems.  We finished the week with our unit assessment.

Math 8

We said a fond farewell to quadratic equations with the unit assessment for Frogs, Fleas, and Painted Cubes.  Students have become confident using visual models and equations to write factored and expanded forms of quadratic functions. At the end of the week we moved on to a new unit, Looking for Pythagoras, exploring the Pythagorean theorem.

Science 7th/8th

We began our review for the upcoming science NECAP by looking at some released questions and considering them as a class.  We discussed what the questions are asking for, and how to eliminate incorrect answers.  We focused on the bolded words like "most likely" and "best", and paying close attention to information presented in diagrams. Students worked as table teams, came to a consensus on the answer, but also had to defend why they eliminated the other answers.  

Students have been working diligently on their postcards from space.  We have learned a lot such as where our solar system is located in the galaxy, how scientists collect data about the atmosphere of exoplanets, and how far a light year is in miles.  We are realizing that space is a very vast place and there are a lot of mysteries to solve. Each student will share one postcard of a place they visited in the Milky Way on Monday.

The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Language Arts:

This week we tuned in to the advertising world. We talked about popular brands and how or why they became so popular. We talked about target audiences and how brands and businesses draw in their target audience, and why that audience may have been chosen in the first place. Our classes also analyzed a series of commercials ranging from Nike to AT&T to Best Buy and Kia to see what kind of marketing and advertising techniques or strategies they were using to draw in their audience and target audience. Finally we ended the week talking about slogans. Students were put to the test to try and match brands with their slogans in a classwide challenge! We found ourselves singing along with the slogans and jingles from Folgers, McDonalds, and Maybelline. So, we asked ourselves do slogans work? Does marketing and advertising work? Our thoughts after today: YES!

7/8 Social Studies

This week Social Studies started off with watching CNN Student News. With everything going on in our world lately, this week’s news had bit more thought-provoking and heavier feeling news than past weeks. As a 7th and 8th grade community we decided that we need more happy news than sad news to start off our week, so made a pact from now until the end of the year to bring in “Silver-lining News” every Monday for current events. Students are being asked to bring in and be willing to share 1 piece of “Silver-Lining New” every Monday. This news can be personal, town-wide, state-wide, country-wide, or global. As our week progressed we picked back up with our economics unit, starting by learning about money and what kids should do with it! We learned that according to financial specialists kids should do 4 things with their money: Save, Invest, Donate, and Spend. Students were asked what they would spend their money on and then started watching the movie “The Story of Stuff” where they learned about what the United States has been doing with their money. Our guiding question has been how does the economy impact our environment and people? Through “The Story of Stuff”, class conversations, brainstorms, a few in-class readings, and a homework assignment titled “What’s in your closet?” we learned about the basics of how our economy works, how the economy impacts our local environment, global environment, and citizens of our world. We also learned about what we can do to help inspire and create change so our economic system can continue without harm to ourselves, our happiness, and our world.

News from Ms. O

Math 5

We are wrapping up our 2 week work on fractions and heading towards an assessment that gives students feedback on their understanding of equivalent fractions and addition and subtraction of fractions.  Students have been leaning on models to do this and learning that these models allow us to understand equivalence and the putting together or taking away with fractions.  The key is to get to a generalization that can work every time. This is the number model algorithm:  when we add fractions with a similar denominator, the sum keeps the denominator and the numerators get added.  When the denominators are different, we must rename (or find an equivalent fraction) the fractions, so that they do have the same denominators.  Then we can add numerators and keep the same denominators.  The same process works for subtraction.

Next stop..decimals and the relationship we can make between decimals and fractions.

Math 6

We have been working on building understanding of fraction of fraction problems and the relationship between them and the operation of multiplication.  Students are finding skills like:  changing improper fractions to mixed numbers (and the reverse), renaming fractions so that they have common denominators (which brings us right back to factors and multiples), adding and subtracting fractions and multiplying them too!  I have been making a point to talk to students about the little fractions of points they lose on assessments for not adding labels to models, units to numbers, stating solutions in the context of the problem, reading carefully when thinking about the question and what is being asked.  This kind of careful attention to the details, makes a mathematician!  I hope that they continue to see that every day and every moment of learning is context for doing everything you can to show and explain.  I’m sure this will translate home too, when beds are made and the dishes are clean after dinner!  The details…

Science 5/6

Scientists lean on models to help them understand scientific phenomena that involve large numbers! We have models for molecules and models for anatomy and we also use models to understand the solar system!  Models have their limitations, but they can help students understand science!  Students have been watching things happen in Earth’s day and night skies forever, but when asking to explain??? Geesh, this is hard.  We are excited to show you next week, just what we know about the relationship between the Earth, Moon, and Sun in terms of the forces that act on them, their related motion, and gravity’s influence on them.  Day and Night?  Moon Phases? Eclipses? Seasons?  Tides? All due to big scientific and math principles like force and motion, mass, distance, and time!  

Our field trip was awesome.  Students planted 250 trees and shrubs along the Allenbrook and learned about the Winooski River and Lake Champlain.  It was fun watching the thrill of a student jumping for joy when a common tern dove for a fish, having students tell me that they couldn’t believe how much there is to see in a drop of water from a wetland, and the feel of joy after planting so many trees.

Mr. Merrill’s Wrap Up

Language Arts 5/6

This week in Language Arts students continued to edit their science research papers.  Students shared their papers on a google doc with Ms. O’Brien and Mr. Merrill.  Students opened their google doc papers on Tuesday to find comments and suggestions for their papers.  We also had a peer editing read aloud activity on Friday.  Students worked with a partner and read their partner’s paper out loud.  Students listened and looked for flow and organizational problems.  Final drafts were due today, and were to include a bibliography and a title page.  

Social Studies 5/6

In Social Studies, we started our economics study by considering the “four uses of money” and how kids can learn to make good financial decisions.  Students considered how they currently use money and brainstormed ideas for putting money to work in their lives.  We then took a look at the production process and its connection to environmental and social issues.  We considered and discussed both the benefits and the costs of making “stuff”.