TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
Voyager is sponsoring the Book & Media Sale at the Craft Fair again, Saturday, Nov. 7th here at WCS. We can only make a profit if we have good merchandise to sell. Please start gathering books and other media (DVDs, Videos, Music CD's, old records, puzzles) and send them in with your students or place them in the large collection boxes located in front offices of both WCS and ABS. We are storing them in the Voyager Project room.
We also need volunteers to set-up and sell during the Craft Fair. Responsible students can help with this! We ask for at least one adult to be present during a block with students selling.
Please sign up here:
Dates to Remember:
December 9th: Voyager Family Night 6-8pm
March 26th: Voyager Recycle Sale
May 6th: Voyager Dance
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We had our first independent Reading Cafe on Monday. Students read an independent book and updated their Reading Response notebooks. We encouraged students to read deeply and build reading stamina during the school year. We also kicked off our new literature round - Mystery and Suspense. 5th graders are reading - Closed for the Season and 6th graders are reading - Coraline. Students will have weekly reading assignments and will be working in their Reading Response notebooks - gathering evidence, tier 2 words, and reading strategies. This week we discussed the literary device - setting and we drew a picture of the setting and made connections to how it enhances the mood of the book. Next week we will be working on character maps.
Narrative writing will be our next writing unit. We started by asking students to write their best “small moment” story and dig deep to use writing strategies that they have used in the past. Writer’s workshops will begin next week.
We also continued our review of the 5 Themes of Geography. We created word maps for many land and water forms including: isthmus, strait, sound, gulf, canyon, and archipelago. We wrapped up the week with an exciting game of jeopardy that reviewed all of the themes. Next week students will have an assessment on the themes and start a theme based project.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Fifth graders worked this week on taking the understanding of clocks, money and fractions and addition and subtraction to the next step: Adding and Subtracting with common denominators. For some students, this is a return to a generalization they have heard before - that you must have common denominators to add or subtract fractions. But for others, this is still a developing understanding. The clock and money models provide a great opportunity for understanding addition and subtraction of fractions. If you have the problem ¾ + ⅕, you can use money to solve this problem. ¾ = 0.75 and ⅕ = 0.20, so you will end up with 0.95! But how does this relate to common denominator? Well, 0.75 = 75/100 and 0.20 = 20/100, so 75/100 + 20/100 = 95/100. And there you have the common denominator! This is an easy example but it is the jumping point for discovering how to find a common denominator for any pair of fractions you are adding or subtracting.
Clarification: Each month we have a rotation of learning. The first two weeks are spelling/vocab and the second two weeks, students are given time in school to work on Moby Max. Students are still asked to do one hour per week of Moby Max, even on the vocab weeks. Please encourage your child, during vocab weeks, to work on their online math learning! These are the weeks that the scores have been lower! Also, when students play their math games on Moby, those minutes don’t count towards their overall minutes for the week.
Math 6: We finished up Prime Time this week by reviewing the last 6 weeks of learning and taking our final assessment. We will be cleaning out our work from the unit and sending it home on Monday. Please look out for this work!
Upcoming Due Date: The Prime Time Number Story is due on Monday. Ask your child to make sure they are making the final touches on their story. They all received feedback on their story from both me and two peers.
Clarification: Each month we have a rotation of learning. The first two weeks are spelling/vocab and the second two weeks, students are given time in school to work on Moby Max. Students are still asked to do one hour per week of Moby Max, even on the vocab weeks. Please encourage your child, during vocab weeks, to work on their online math learning! These are the weeks that the scores have been lower! Also, when students play their math games on Moby, those minutes don’t count towards their overall minutes for the week.
Science ⅚: We wrapped up our electricity and magnetism unit this week by finishing our vocabulary word maps and preparing and taking an assessment. We have learned so much! Students mapped a series of new Tier III words from this unit by defining the words and then describing the association or relationship between those words. They are really impressive especially due to the fact that they were not allowed to use the internet. Their understandings all came from experiences in the classroom and even they were surprised at how much they have learned. We hope you saw last week’s photos on the exciting telegraph stations we set up. The telegraphs, made by Dan Fleming, our engineer in residence, were a great way for students to see how the science of electromagnetism, was applied to a real life, engineered mechanism, that changed the technology of communication. We had two telegraph stations separated by 50 ft of wire over which we sent electrical pulses, or dots and dashes, just like people in the mid 1800’s. It was cool!
Coming up: VEEP, Vermont Energy Education Program, is coming to our classroom on Tuesday! A great extension to our learning about motors and generators. I am speaking to the VEEP rep this weekend about timing, but I will let you know in case you want to drop by!
The Week in Ms. Wesnak’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
To start our week in AM Humanities students continued their work with Ms. Baker by creating their individual art pieces for our large art installation which will take place the week before Thanksgiving. Keep an eye out for a formal invitation in your email! As we moved through our week we continued our work with informational writing by beginning our Global Village work and forming our families. Students took a look at a great time lapse video from one man’s travels around the globe. He travelled to 17 different countries over the course of 348 days! Working with their families, students picked their countries for the Global Village. This year we will have families from countries such as Iceland, Egypt, Thailand, and more! Students also got started on their research for their informational writing piece. This will be a 5 paragraph essay and each student will be writing about a specific topic in regards to their country. Some of the topics include: People, History, Geography,and The Arts. Students are really pushing and building their research skills, as they are not allowed to use Google yet! We have spent 2 of our classes so far in the library, and students have been finding some great information and taking strong notes. Students are really having to dig through the books and readings to find answers. They are also having to think critically and creatively in order to pull and synthesize information from a variety of sources. This has been great practice in researching and is providing the students with a wealth of information and knowledge for the Global Village!
Our afternoon classes were dedicated to reflecting on the Model United Nations debates, and building a bridge to our Global Village Unit. Students were put to the challenge with their Global Village families to participate in the Global Puzzle Simulation! Students were given a 550 piece jigsaw puzzle to solve in a 40 minute class. There were many restrictions given to the students as well, such as they couldn’t talk, they couldn’t see the cover, they had time limits, and at the end of their class period they had to break down all of the work they had done. The purpose behind this simulation was to showcase all aspects of problem solving on a personal level and a global level. On the personal level this was a great way for our Global Village families to bond and work together to solve a common problem by using all members of the group. On the global level this was a great way to simulate how it is important for all countries to work together, and to understand that each country represents a separate piece in the global puzzle. By having students not be able to talk, this was a great way to simulate how when there are people from different countries trying to communicate to solve problems, it can be difficult to get ideas across fluently and completely with common understanding. The puzzles themselves represented global problems, and by not giving the students the cover to the box of the puzzle they were left not knowing what the outcome or solution would look like. Students had to guess and make predictions as to what the solution to their problem would look like, much like what happens in the real world. Sometimes, you just don’t know what problems will come your way or what the exact solution is going to look like in the end. Overall, we had a great experience and students really enjoyed this simulation! We are all very excited to continue on our global journey!
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP7
This week we began our investigation into positive and negative integers by using different models such as number lines and red and black chip boards. We did a fun experiment where we placed an ice cube in water and graphed the progress using our new Go Temp! Temperature probes. Our question was whether the temperature change was linear or nonlinear. We also looked at temperature moving in a negative direction and formed an equation to show our results.
CMP8
Mold growth, invasive plant species and Burmese pythons were the order of business this week in math class as we explored exponential functions in nature. Through the week we formulated the exponential growth equation which is y = a (bx), where “a” is the y intercept and b is the growth factor. So for example in Hurricane Katrina if 100 pythons were released by mistake, at a growth factor of 1.5, you would triple your number in three years. It is frightening! Students also created crafty exponent rule books to refer to as we work through our exponential growth unit.
Science 7th/8th
This week we began with making models of the phases of the cell cycle which included interphase, mitosis and cytokinesis. Students had different pieces of candy from Twizzlers, Smarties, marshmallows and Skittles to form a nuclear membrane, centrioles, spindle fibers and the chromatids. We took pictures of our steps and labeled the process in which our cells divide to make identical copies. We had a Cellular Biology and Microscopy Review doing a speed dating format where students moved around the room to form dyad pairs to discuss compelling topics like: “How to focus a microscope?” or “How are plant cells and animals cells similar and different?” We completed our unit test. Our next mini-unit will be on genetics and heredity. Be prepared for questions and surveys about traits that your family may possess.
