Week of May 5

Ms.Q's Corner

CMP8

Our investigations this week looked at inequalities; how to solve them and graph them.  We considered the amount of CO2 that cars and minivans emit to the atmosphere along with the constaints of car usage.  Understanding how to shade inequality graphs, and the meaning of the shading were explored.  We are completing this unit with a review and It's in the System Unit test will be next week.

CMP7

Students built models of prisms to calculate surface area.  We compared the surface area of different triangular, square, pentagonal and hexagonal prisms all made from an 8 1/2  x 11 piece of paper.  Through our investigations we concluded that increasing the number of sides increases the surface area and the volume.  We were able to see that as a prism became more cylindrical in shape, the more volume it held.

Science 7th/8th

This week we spent time reviewing test taking strategies to prepare for the science NECAP.  Each day we began with several questions and worked together to discern what information the questions was asking for and ways to eliminate answers.  

We continued our study of climate change by reviewing the hemospheric CO2 and temperature data since 1880.  We created an atmosphere in two bottles and added CO2 to one bottle and left both of them under a heat source.  Over time we collected data about the temperature change and compared the two to see if there was a correlation between CO2 and temperature increase.   We found that the bottle with CO2 had a significant increase in temperature in comparison to the bottle with air.

Parents of 8th graders

Next week on Wednesday and Thursday,  May 14th and 15th all 8th graders at WCS will be taking the NECAP science test.  Over the last week, we have been reviewing test taking strategies and major science concepts.  Students should plan on having a good breakfast and a good night sleep before we undertake this assessment.  Thank you for your support!

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up

Students continue to focus on a different spelling and witing concept each week throughout the month of May.  For 5th graders, students learned how a prefix and/or suffix can build a word.  6th graders studied tricky words, espeically words with double letters and silent letters.  All students practiced subject/verb agreement on their No Red Ink assignment.  For our reading concept, students learned how to identify the main idea of an article by identifying the most important words.  

In our Humanities PM time, we are practicing geography and mapping skills, learning about exact location - using latitude and longitide and relative location - using distance and direction to find locations.

Final drafts of the bottle/tap water argument papers were due today.

Next Week

Spring Assessment - On Wednesday, students will be taking the DRP (Degrees of Reading Power) assessment.

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanities: This week in Humanities we spent our morning time together kicking off our Myths and Legends unit! This will be our final unit of the year, and students will end up creating their own myth or legend about the creation of a global geographical feature of their choice. We’ve spent our time so far creating definitions for the terms, building a large graphic organizer to keep track of all the stories we read aloud, and reading some great examples of myths or legends. Students have really enjoyed the read alouds so far, and we’ve been having great discussions about the literary elements of each story. During our afternoon time together we started our global geography unit. We started off by viewing a video titled “25 Maps to Change Your View of the World”. After watching the video we discussed how viewing these maps changed our view of the world. Knowing that we would be looking at a lot of maps during this unit, we turned our focus to absolute location and learning about latitude, longitude, the equator, the prime meridian, and how to read maps. Students used latitude and longitude to find cities around the world, and also played a thrilling game of “Message in a Bottle”. Students used the lines of latitude and longitude to rescue castaways from a shipwreck! This was a lot of fun, and students had a great time getting used to reading the global grid. Starting on Wednesday students began work on the “National Geographic A-Z Global Scavenger Hunt”. Students are in teams of 2-3 using 1 atlas to find geographic features around the world - the real challenge? The answers for each clue have to go in alphabetical order! Let the challenge begin!!

The Global Connections Project: Connecting students through learning from VT - NZ!

Weekly Update: This week we had our first Skype session with Blockhouse Bay Intermediate, and it was a great success! Students on both sides of the globe had a great time and asked great questions. Here are some tidbits from our conversation:

    Q: Do you actually eat a lot of Kiwis (the fruit) in NZ?

    A: Yes! There are two kinds of Kiwis - green and gold.

    Q: What is your favorite American TV show?

    A: America’s Funniest Home Videos!!

    Q: What is your school day like? What is school like?

    A:    - Recess or outdoor times 3 times a day

        - Eat lunch outside and get hot lunch or prepared lunch from a concession stand type building

        - No hallways or corridors! They walk outside to get from classroom to classroom

        - They can go barefoot in school!

   

    Q: Where do you go on vacation or holiday?

    A: Australia, Fiji, India

Right now we have built a new online classroom via Kidblog, so soon our students will be able to do CNN Student News blogging with our Blockhouse Bay peers! We are also working on an interactive global map that all students will be able to access and work with for their global geography unit.

The Week in Ms. O’s

Math 5:  Yippee!  Just finished Unit 6. Our next pursuit is to investigate the story of multiplication of fractions and decimals. 

Math 6:  Variables and Patterns is proving to be a new and interesting challenge for students.  Our discussions have focused on variables (what are the variables we are relating in any given situation), how tables and graphs can help us understand patterns and relationships amongst variables and the desirable task of graphing, which I know everyone just loves.  This unit is all about generalizations for linear and nonlinear patterns and is really important algebra prep.  We will continue to plug away and towards the end of the year, secure fluency of numbers in all formats and do a little geometry!  Productive week for sure!

Science ⅚:  What a busy week!  We have been organizing a community connection around bottled water and have made some important discoveries about bottled water use in our school.  Our fact finding mission began with some early writing and editing and testing and writing and editing again, of a school wide survey to ask about practices around tap and bottled water.  More than 350 people completed the survey and we will spend Monday analyzing this data.  Students in “the plastic recovery team” have been collecting plastic bottles in classrooms at the end of each day.  It is really unbelievable how many plastic bottles we have collected, given that we are not collecting in the cafeteria each day.  Other tasks this week included:  the life cycle of a product (tracing a product we use daily back to its natural resource origin) and watching iMovies from the Human Body Project.

   

       

Week of April 28

Camp Abnaki Field Trip June 2nd - 4th  -  Permission Slips went home with students this week.  Forms are due May 9th

We are in need of chaperones!  Please contact Katie Fieldsend at 871-6148 or KFieldsend@cssu.org if interested.  

From Administrative Team...

Dear K-8 parents and guardians,

The Williston schools are pleased to announce that this year's parent survey is now available to complete on-line.  This is an opportunity for you to let us know how well we are doing, and particularly how well we are meeting the needs of your child[REN].   The more parents who respond to the survey then the more reliable and valuable the information will be, and the more able we will be to use the data to improve our schools.  We strongly encourage you to participate.

We will be reviewing this data in the days right before and after school gets out.  To have your input included, please complete this survey by Friday, May 16th.  It can be accessed on-line by copying the following link into your web browser:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W7X7WBS

If you need any help, would like to use one of the computers at school to complete the survey, or would prefer a paper version of the survey, please contact Cid Gause at 871-6104 or cgause@cssu.org.

Thank you,

The Williston Administrative Team

To parents of 8th graders...

Please consider signing your child up for 2 or more weeks at the CVU summer camp. It's 4 days a week and snacks and lunch are provided.

There are 12 different academic, artistic, recreational, and technology interest area options.

Your child will have fun while getting familiar with the building and getting to know others students from the surrounding towns.

There are partial and full scholarships available.

You can register online at www.cvuhs.org.

You can also contact Duncan Wardwell at dwardwell@cvuhs.org or contact Chris Ford at CFord@cssu.org (871-6176.)

FAP Fundraisers:

• Williston Run for Education- Saturday, May 17th 10am  ; 5K Run/ Walk & Kids Fun Run  -   Registration forms available at WCS or day of event

• Vermont Lake Monsters Game- Sunday, June 29th 5:05 game time. Grandstand tickets are $6 each - 50% of ticket sales will be donated back to Williston schools !!!
  
  

Ms. Q's Corner

CMP8 This week in It's in The System, we dabbled in inequalities.  We learned that the best way to solve inequalities is to solve  them like equalities  One that is done you can find the where the solution is greater than or less than.  We reviewed how to graph inequalities on a horizontal number line and utilized Desmos to see what inequalities look like graphed on a grid.  

CMP7  We began the week with exploring the relationship between surface area, volume and dimensions of rectangular prisms.  We practiced drawing different 3-D figures using isometric dot paper.  It was a very challenging activity to create drawings of cubes stacked to form irregular structures.  We completed the week with looked at garbage eating worms and the amount of garbage they can consume in relation to the number of worms and their container size.  

Science 7th/8th  

This week of science was abridged due to our wonderful 8th grade challenge presentations.  We began our investigation of climate change.  We learned about residents of Tuvalu, a grouping of atolls in the South Pacific, and how rising sea levels have impacted on their homes, livelihood and way-of-life.  We explored the difference between weather and climate and began to investigate some of our essential questions about climate change.  What are the causes of climate change?  How will our ecosystem change? What can be done?  Over the next few weeks, we will be investigating the science behind climate change and possible ways to help slow the process.

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up

We started the week off with 8th grade challenge final presentations. The presentations covered a wide range of interesting topics. Students asked wonderful follow up questions and were a fantastic audience.  We then picked up where we left off before the break.  Students found their argument outlines and we continued to identify key components of good argument writing, using an article in the Observer written by a former Voyager student.  First drafts of their argument pieces are due Tuesday.  Students will write about water issues that we learned about before vacation.  

Weekly assignments will change during the month of May.  Students will have review assignments for No Red Ink and will also have a weekly spelling lesson and quiz.  See Jupiter Grades for details.

Geography lessons focused on location. We learned about and practiced using latitude and longitude coordinates, playing a game finding locations around the world. Students really enjoyed searching for countries, landforms and bodies of water.

The Week in Ms. O’s

Math 5:  We have been building some content knowledge to fuel our bottled water debate and this week in math, we were able to cross into the math realm with this work.  We took our refrigerator data on Monday and our recycling data from Ms. O’s one week collection of recycling and gave it a math spin.  Students created class data sets with their personal refrigerator inventory and came to an astounding conclusion - that 80 % of our packaging and containment is plastic.  We also investigated Ms. O’s recycling, a week’s worth of collection from one family of five living in Vermont.  Students recognized the difference in the fridge and household recycling sets and came to some conclusions of plastic.  Interesting discoveries to have!  The rest of our week was filled with decimal fun...adding and subtracting decimals and identifying decimals between decimals.  Today, we began our discussion of percent...a close relative of decimals and fractions!  Unit 6 Assessment next week!

Math 6 - We have been building some content knowledge to fuel our bottled water debate and this week in math, we were able to cross into the math realm with this work.  We took our refrigerator data on Monday and our recycling data from Ms. O’s one week collection of recycling and gave it a math spin.  Students created class data sets with their personal refrigerator inventory and came to an astounding conclusion - that 80 % of our packaging and containment is plastic.  We also investigated Ms. O’s recycling, a week’s worth of collection from one family of five living in Vermont.  Students recognized the difference in the fridge and household recycling sets and came to some conclusions of plastic.  Interesting discoveries to have!

We picked up in Variables and Patterns where we ended off before break, deepening our understanding of graphs and tables and how identification of patterns help tell us the story from the data.  Students are likely getting a little tired of graphing, but the foundation is really important for 7th grade.  Good work with week from all.

Science ⅚ :  What a busy week of learning about plastics, where oil comes from, and why plastics are an interesting and complex problem and solution for our world.  Students learned about natural resources, renewables and not, and reconfirmed understanding of the value of recycling.  Lots of math/science connections.  Superb conversations.  You would have been amazed and proud of your aware and curious and activistic children!

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanities: This week on house we started off by watching our 8th graders present their 8th Grade Challenge Projects! These were fantastic! There were a huge variety of topics covered, and the students did a really great job with their presentations. Bravo 8th Grade! Once we finished up with viewing 8th Grade Challenge presentations we got back to our normal schedule. During our morning time together students finished up filming their “Day in The Life” videos to share with the Blockhouse Bay School in New Zealand! Students really had a great time filming and editing their movies using iMovie on the school MacBooks. Students say it was “fun, interesting, new, majestic, beautiful, inspiring, eye-opening, patriotic, and even funny!” During our time together in the afternoon we worked on our Road Trip U.S.A. projects! These road trips are coming along beautifully. Students were also introduced to the second half of this project which is creating an online scrapbook using Google sites. The Google site aspect of this project is allowing the students to get very creative with their road trip. They are asking questions such as: What will I bring? Will I bring a pet? What will I listen to while I drive for 12 hours? Is this going to be boring or fun? Will I get a flat tire? What kind of car will I be driving? As you can imagine, the answers for these questions span a wide spectrum! It’s been really fun to watch this trips come together, and I can’t wait to see the final products!

Week of April 14

Happy Break!  Yeah Break!  Got Pencils?  Could you get some for your kiddo over break?  We are fresh out and it is like Survivor here! Ms. O

**Reminder for Pie pick-up at Adam’s Market today until 5pm!!  Thank you for supporting Voyager House!**

CMP8

We continued our investigation of solving systems of linear equations with a candy mystery.  Each student was given a bag of 60 candies made up of an unspecified number of m&m’s and jelly beans. They were able to discern the mass of the total candies and found the average mass of a m & m and a jelly bean.  Students created two equations m + j = 60 and .9m + 1.3j = mass of the bag.  By having both equations they were able to find the solution set or # of m & m’s and jelly beans symbolically and by graphing.  After our math work we looked in the bag to see how close we came to the actual number.  It was sweet surprise!

CMP7

We began the week with review and a jeopardy game on linear equations. Students completed the “Moving Straight Ahead” Unit Test and we are now entering into “Filling and Wrapping” a unit where we investigate area and volume of three dimensional objects.  This week we explored what dimensions you need in order to find surface area or volume and we discovered how Pi was originated.

Science 7th/8th- This week was a bit abridged due to our amazing Songkran Festival and  the extensive fire drill.  We completed the CSSU common assessment and began our discussion about climate change.

The Week in Ms. O’s

Math 5

Fifth graders have been working on an understanding of decimals, deepening understanding of place value and why fractions and decimals are just different ways to say the same number. We are working on order decimals and finding decimals between decimals.  It has been really productive work and I feel like students are really building a deep understanding of our Base Ten system.

Math 6

We began Variables and Patterns this week.  Our work has centered around the idea of patterns in tables and patterns in graphs. Students have come up with some great conjectures for tables and graphs, specifically that points on a graph always match the data points in the table; the story is the same for a graph, even if the interval scale changes; steeper the line in a graph, the greater the change.  Really sophisticated observations for three days in.  We had our last studio of the year and it was fantastic.  WCS teachers were so impressed with the habits of these 6th graders – they persevere, they model, they talk to each other, they are critical thinkers.  Good for them.

Science 5/6

We successfully engineering a natural materials filter to simulate the basic filtering system on Earth’s surface.  Students independently tested natural materials, like sand, moss, leaves, sand, etc. to identify their filtering quality.  From there, students collaboratively built bottle filters, a three inch layer of natural materials to see just how effective these materials can be when stacked together.  This allowed us to generalize the value of our Earth’s surface for groundwater health.  From there, we are moving into landfills and the MRF.  The Materials Recovery Facility or MRF is here in Williston.  I am hoping to have someone come to class to talk about this awesome place after break.  As we continue work learning about the basics of waste disposal, we will focus our energy on the packaging related to bottled water.

Homework Over the Break:  You may have some refrigerator pickers over the break.  All students in 5/6 have an assignment to categorize the material packaging in the refrigerator over break. I heard a million excuses – I’m not at home, I have no fridge, I’m in Florida the whole time…I’d love it if you could make this happen, even if it’s Grandma’s fridge.  It is important data for our class work on bottled water.

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up

Wow, what a wet and fun week!  After wrapping up our spring on demand writing assessments on Monday morning (the students put in a great effort!), we celebrated the Thai Songkran Festival (New Year Water Celebration) lead by Apple, our Thai scholar. Apple gave a presentation, then students partipated in two of the traditions - showing respect and giving thanks (or asking for forgiveness) by kneeling before a teacher and sprinkling flower water over the hands, and having fun outdoors by spraying friends with water (a sign of renewal, cleansing, and new beginnings).

We then dove deeper into our study of water issues.  Students completed their research using our wiki of fantastic sources, taking notes using the Cornell method. We also watched a CBS news story on bottle water bans on college campuses.  Students were excited to act and we started to brainstorm things that we might do here at WCS to limit or ban bottle water.. We had a great brainstorm - look for some action on this in May.  

We then had former Voyager student Kellie Weening present her CVU senior challenge work on global water issues to our students.  She plans to work with the students in the fall on a rain barrel project.

Finally, we had a UVM debate team member - Alex Bulick, lead our students through the format that they use in competition.  Alex discussed strategy and debating techniques with the students, then we had our own debate using the format and techniques discussed. Questions debated were the same argument questions students are writing about - Is bottle water really better? and Should bottled water be banned at WCS?

The Week in Ms. Wesnak's Room

7/8 Humanities: This has been a very full and very fun week in Humanities! For our final week before vacation our morning time together was really focused on finishing up our work on the argumentative essay: GPS vs. Paper Map. Students had their rough drafts due for peer editing on Tuesday and their final drafts were due on Friday. Our morning classes on Wednesday and Thursday were focused on creating storyboards for our first project with the Blockhouse Bay Intermediate School in New Zealand. Our first assignment is to create ¨Day in the Life" videos to exchange via our school YouTube channels. Students will be creating videos that showcase what the average day is like for a Voyager student. These video projects already have been very fun to work on, and we are all very excited to see the videos made from students at Blockhouse Bay Intermediate! In our afternoon classes we focused on our Road Trip U.S.A. project. As the week went on students really started to get into this project by mapping out their routes, deciding on exciting and fun places to stop along the way, and beginning to build their interactive maps through Google Maps Engine. We were lucky enough to have Ms.Birdsall join our class this week to introduce us to Google Maps Engine and get all of our students started on creating their interactive road trip map. If you haven't seen or used Google Maps Engine before, I highly suggest it! It is not only fun and pretty easy to use, but you can really go into great detail when planning any trip. Using this site has certainly sparked the travel bug in our 7/8 students. Over break students are encouraged to do some work on their maps and/or continue working on writing their short profiles of the 6 stops they are going to make along their road trip across the country! It has been a packed week, but certainly a fun one! Hope everyone has a wonderful April vacation!

**8th Grade Challenge Update from Ms.W**

Attention all parents of 8th Graders: All students have a scheduled time to present their 8th Grade Challenge Projects. They are either presenting on the Monday or Tuesday after break. Each student has a scheduled time to present, and you are of course invited to join our Kiva to view their presentation! If you are interested in knowing your child's presentation time please email me, and I would be happy to provide you with that information. The writing component and presentation is due at their scheduled time. We are all very excited to see the final outcome of their hard work!

Week of April 7

Reminder for Adam’s Market Pie pick-up!!!  Pick-up your pre-ordered pie at Adam’s Farm Market on April 17th or 18th between 10am-5pm!

Water Festival - Monday, April 14

Apple Prommasakul, our Thai Scholar, will be leading us in the Water Festival on Monday, a great Thai tradition.  Students should wear a colorful shirt for the event and be prepared to get a little wet.

Williston Central School Fundraisers:

• Sterling Night at Ramunto’s  Tuesday, April 15th

Ramuntos will donate a percentage of orders all day.  Eat in or Take Out. No Coupon required.

• Swift’s Mother’s Day Flower Sale Order your 10” hanging flower baskets for pick-up at Adams Farm Market between 5/7 and 5/11.  You may select from the hundreds of baskets available in solid or a combination of colors.  Order forms available in the School Bell or in WCS & ABS front office  $24.00 each.

WCS Dialogue Night- rescheduled for Wednesday, April 16th 6-7:45pm WCS Dining Room.  For the pizza part of the evening, 6-6:15PM, please RSVP to Sarah,

SAP Counselor, sklionsky@cssu.org or 871-6079, by Monday 4/14- co-sponsored by FAP

We will provide students with a homework pass for the night!  Encourage your child to go!

Ms. Q’s Corner

CMP8

This week we took a pause from our new investigation “It’s in the System” to reintroduce exponent rules, solving algebraic equations with fractions and simplifying equations with polynomials.  This review will help in transforming  linear equations from slope intercept form to standard form.  Knowing how to transform an equation will allow students to begin finding solutions to systems of linear equations.  This week the  Algebra Final  was set for  Friday, June 6th.

CMP7

We are coming to the completion of “Moving Straight Ahead” with emphasis on creating equations from points, graphs and tables.  We also investigated how a linear function can be translated by changing the coefficient or slope of the line and by changing the y-intercept.  We observed how you can tell from an equation if the line is parallel or perpendicular.  Next week students will be taking the unit assessment.

  

Science 7th/8th

We began the week with the kickoff of our PSA  project. Working alone or with a partner, students researched a genetic or infectious disease, created a short well written script and filmed their 30 second- 120 second spot.

Students utilized a variety of media apps to get their word across.

Notes from Ms. Sherman-

Celebrating Voyager 8th Graders

This Friday, Ms. Sherman and Ms. Wesnak, your fearless teachers, are hosting an 8th grade celebration night. The night will be a great way for our 8th grade family to come together to reflect on their time as Voyager students, indulge in some great eats, and have some merriment after hours. We both look forward to seeing you there and celebrating! We would like to say thank you to all the 8th grade families for providing transportation to and from the school.

The Week in Ms. O’s

Math 5:  Students have been perfectly the art of addition and subtraction of fractions.  Students are working hard on two basic principles:  Least Common Multiple and Greatest Common Factor.  When do I use the LCM?  The GCF?  I have been psyched and amazed at the versatility students are showing with fraction operations and excited to move forward with multiplication and division.  Late in the week we began looking at decimals.  We have made the leap seamlessly!  Students understand that decimals are fractions with denominators of 10, 100, 1000, and are revisiting ideas of magnitude in our base ten number system.  

Math 6:  We wrapped up our Data about Us book this week!  The concepts covered in this book have been a little challenging in that students had to decide on the story of the data based on measures of center (mode, median and mean) and measures of variability (range and interquartile range).  Although most students come to sixth grade knowing how to find mode and median, students are now asked to decide which measure of middle to use.  What if the data is skewed, symmetrical, clustered, which measure of middle is best?  Are there any outliers and how do they affect the mean?  I think many students have made long term changes in their understanding of data.  Tough unit!  On to Variables and Patterns, our first significant dip into algebra concepts before the big 7th grade year in linear and nonlinear equations.

Science ⅚:

Students wrapped up their iMovies this week and should have posted to the WCS you tube site.  Feel free to take a look at them.  I found myself laughing hysterically (and learning too) while watching some the other night.  I was amazed at the ease with which they made the movies, now I am hoping that they are rich in science.  I will assess these over break.  I will also be sure to let you know if your child has not uploaded to youtube.  Could mean they aren’t done.  

We are doing a mini integrated unit in science and humanities on tapped and bottled water.  We began our first science investigation on Friday looking at natural filter systems.  Students will be engineering the best filter system they can on Monday and Tuesday.  This is based on the science they investigate on natural materials and their filtering quality.  We will move on to other investigations around plastics and water on Earth.

Mr. Merrill’s ⅚ Humanities Wrap Up

Should the show go on? Whether or not to keep killer whales in marine parks was the focus of our debate this week. Common core standards include speaking and listening skills, and debate.  The debate format we used reflected the argument writing format that we are using in class, giving students another way to practice their argument organizing skills. Students also completed persuasive letters, with the hope that area tree nurseries will support our community service project of planting trees at Camp Abnaki in June.  

In preparation for our final argument writing piece, students learned to take Cornell notes. They will be using a library wiki to find articles, video, and podcasts to complete their research next week.  Students also shared in creating a huge Google presentation titled, “Bodies of Water Around the World”.  A very impressive digital slide show!

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanities - This week in Humanities students continued their work around geography by working on their argumentative writing piece and studying U.S. geography. During our morning time together students were given a thorough outline of the argumentative essay, a checklist for argumentative writing, and class time to work on their writing. This was all in prep for their peer edit day on Tuesday. Their final draft will be due on the Friday before vacation, and when we return from vacation the battle between the GPS and a Paper Map will be brought to the debate floor! During our afternoon time students took a quiz on the Western and Midwestern regions of the United States on Monday. As the week went on we learned about the 5 Themes of Geography and specifically zoned in on the theme of “Place”, which includes physical and human characteristics. Students came up with a list of global physical characteristics, and we also labeled some physical characteristics of the U.S. on a map. Students also took a look at various maps of the United States. We compared and contrasted maps of climate, vegetation, land use, and energy/mineral resources. We also looked at the relationship between climate and vegetation, and climate and land use. This is all in preparation for our Road Trip U.S.A. project which will launch next week!

***We also had a special guest visitor in our classroom this week! Jade Dobson, a 6th Grade Teacher from Auckland, New Zealand came to visit Vermont and our classroom this week. She shared out information on New Zealand and the Maori culture. Students learned a lot and also laughed a lot during her time in our classroom. Why was Jade here you might ask? Well, I’m very happy to announce that our Humanities class will be taking part in a global project with Jade’s school in New Zealand! Jade will be our contact teacher in New Zealand, and we will be working with her and her students on a variety of projects. One of our first projects will be around current events and global geography. Students will be offered chances to Skype with Jade’s students, we will be sharing videos through our school youtube channels, sharing google documents to complete projects together, and also sharing our writing and thoughts through Kidblog. A permission slip and further information about the project and how we were given this great opportunity will be going home next week!! Kia Ora!

Week of March 31

Voyager FAP Parent Representatives

Voyager house has been extremely fortunate over the past four years to have had Ann Schmidt as our FAP representative. During that time, Ann helped Voyager house establish some of our best traditions and fund raising events.  She has also been a strong advocate for Voyager at the school level and has supported teachers and students in numerous ways. While we are not quite ready to say good-bye to Ann, it is time to start recruiting a new group of parents to support Voyager house and represent us at the FAP level.  

Next year, Voyager would like to have one parent representative for each grade level.  By sharing the responsibilities of FAP representative by grade level, we will be ensuring that Voyager will continue to have strong representation for our Voyager community, our traditions will continue to grow and evolve, and we will maintain an experienced group of parents who can share the responsibilities of the position.  Please consider joining our FAP team.  Feel free to contact any of the Voyager teachers or current FAP representatives for more information.

Ms’ Q’s Corner

CMP8

We have been very industrious in class this week gearing up for our unit tests.  Group 1 worked on completing the square with more and more complex quadratic equations.  We looked closely at the relationship between a parent function and their related translations.  We worked to become adept at interpreting and finding the roots of a quadratic functions through multiple ways; vertex form and  the quadratic formula .  Group 2 continued their work with factoring, solving multi-step equations and using the distributive property.  Next week we gather together as one group to begin systems of equations.

CMP7

When is one payment plan better than another?  What ways can we find the intersection or “break even” point of two linear relationships?  Students investigated using tables, graphing, and equations in order to find that point.  We also dabbled into inequalities.  When  does it “pay” to go with one payment plan when “X” is greater than or less than a specific amount?  Students took a brief “Check-up" this week and we began to investigate slope as a ratio between rise and run.

Science 7th/8th

We completed our hemophiliac investigation with a claim and evidence statement based on our experimental coin toss showing the outcome of a healthy father and hemophilia carrier mother and a father with hemophilia and a carrier mother.  Students compared their Punnett squares or theoretical data with our experimental data.  We read and highlighted several chapters on Infectious disease, took notes from a brief lecture on pathogens, and did a quick research project. With their research, students created “Wanted Dead” signs for a pathogen of their choice.  Student’s were given a broad pathogen category (parasite, bacteria, virus and fungus) and they selected a “germ” that produced a disease that they found interesting.  We investigated pathogens like H1N1 virus, clostridium botulium bacteria and exotic parasites.  Next week we begin our disease research project.

Mr. Merrill ⅚ Humanities Wrap up

What would you choose - a glass of tap water or bottled water?  That is the question that students had to take a position on to start our interdisciplinary unit on Water. Students debated the question and wrote a short position piece.  In preparation for more argument writing, we used a position paper on climate change to find and understand the “claim” of the paper and the evidence and reasons used to support the claim. We will look more deeply into the specific strategies that can be used for this genre of writing next week.  

We also watch “Tapped”, a documentary that focuses on the health and environmental costs of bottled water. Students will use this information, along with reading and research to be completed next week, in a final debate.

Finally, we will be writing persuasive letters to area businesses, to help us with a tree planting project we are hoping to do at Camp Abnaki in the spring.

The Week in Ms. O’s

5th Grade Math: We spent another week looking at Greatest Common Factor and Least Common Multiple as a way to understand fractions.  This foundational work will help move us forward with operations with fractions.  

Fluency is really important.  I will be checking on this regularly this last trimester.  Students should be using FASTT math, or you can always download an app for the iPhone!!  Hooda math is just a simple flashcard system that you can download from the App store.  It is free.  This is a good way to focus on some facts while skipping the ones you know.  Try it out!

6th Grade Math:  6th Graders have been tackling the five summary statistics  idea for determining meaningfulness of data.  We have matched a new representation, the box and whisker plot, or box plot as a way to identify just how variable a data set is.  Simultaneously, we have been suring up foundations in decimal operations.  Multiplication and division are a little more complicated than addition and subtraction, but the foundational principles of place value still apply.  I am pushing students toward the standard algorithm.  Don’t be afraid now, to share that one.  It is the one you know the best!  I will help with the conceptual work at school, but fluency in decimals will be important for moving forward in proportional reasoning.

⅚ Science:  It was a busy week of constructing, climbing, cooking, dissecting and interviewing.  Students captured their learning in video footage and spent Thursday and Friday editing movies to show expertise on body systems.  I was at the National Science Teachers Association conference in Boston, so have yet to see the excitement.  We will spend the first few days of this week reviewing our work and making any final edits.  

The Week in Ms.Wesnak’s Room

7/8 Humanities: This week in Humanities our 7th and 8th graders began their work on argumentative writing and also began testing and applying their knowledge of U.S. geography. During our A.M. time together this week classes practiced finding evidence and analyzing its meaning by trying to solve a variety of crimes. Our class used stories/puzzles from the book “Crime and Puzzlement” to get used to digging up evidence and answering the “why” questions. “Why” questions include: Why is this important? How does this connect to what we are trying to answer or solve? Through this activity students had to weed out the important evidence and the important clues from the irrelevant ones. These activities were quite entertaining and the classes had a lot of fun taking on the role of a sleuth! As the week continued on students were introduced to the topic for their argumentative writing piece which is: GPS vs. Paper Maps - Which is better for getting you where you need to go? Once our writing is complete we will conclude with a final debate. Students are reading a variety of articles giving them examples of hard evidence towards either side of the argument. Students will have to use the skills we practiced during our days of solving crime and apply them to this argumentative writing task. We took some time in class to do a close reading of one of the articles. We read pieces of the article aloud, discussed proper highlighting techniques, responded to the text with pen or pencil, and analyzed why we wrote what we did or highlighted what we did. The classes are pretty evenly split between GPS and paper map supporters, so once our writing is complete, our final debate should be quite interesting! Speaking of travelling, our P.M. time together has been spent travelling all over the U.S.! This week we moved out of the Northeastern and Southern regions and into the Midwestern and Western regions. Students will be quizzed on the Western and Midwestern regions on Monday afternoon, so keep the studying going! As a close to our week students started work on a SUPER Venn diagram. Students had to pick 4 states, 1 from each major region, that they would like to live in. Using the Venn diagram students had to compare and contrast these 4 states. To compare and contrast these states they are using the “2014 U.S. Almanac and Atlas” from Junior Scholastic. Once the diagram is complete they will try to determine some possible reasons behind the similarities and differences they found. This in-class project became very fun, as students started to talk about (and dream about) what life would be like living in another state.

Ms. Jess

Summer is coming... “I THINK”!