TA’s Notes:
***Please do not send in any food to be shared among Voyager students***
***Please notify us if your child has strep. Thank you for this courtesy.***
Dates to Know:
- Wed, Oct 18th- Picture Retakes! Happening around 11:00am. An announcement will be made to all students who need a picture retake, order forms are available in front office or requesting from Mrs. Fieldsend
- Fri, Oct 20th- No School Parent/Teacher/Student conferences this day
- Fri, Oct 27th- Voyager Harvest Breakfast Open House 7:45 - 8:45am in Voyager
House. Come see various works students have created on display.
- Wed, Dec 6th- Voyager Family Night / Variety Show 6 - 8pm at WCS in Dining Room & Auditorium
NOTES FROM MS. Sherman:
HOMEWORK CLUB!!!!
Homework club has begun! Students will be supervised by Allison Cobb, our fabulous house paraprofessional. Students will be given a movement break and snack at the beginning of the session. See the information below. If you have more questions please feel free to contact me via email: csherman@cvsdvt.org.
When: Tuesdays (2:00-3:30) and Wednesday (3:00-4:30)
Where: Voyager House
Transportation: Personal Pick Up or late bus available
Given: Break and Snack
Who Should Attend: Students who have the ability to work independently at times, self-regulate their behavior with minimal reminders, and who have to ability to sustain work attention for 30-60 minutes in a period.
Notes: Some students may be requested to attend due to their need for individual assistance with work completion.
The Week in Mr. Merrill’s Room (⅚ Humanities):
We finished reading I Am Malala this week. Malala’s powerful story will be the basis of our first “big” piece of writing. With our class constructed claim for our argument piece, students started pulling evidence from their notes, the book, and other sources to support the claim. We explored the difference between good, better, and best evidence (ask your student about the catamount lesson) and then students worked together in small groups to find evidence from selected pages of the book. The evidence was compiled and students put the found evidence in categories (good, better, best) and selected 3 pieces of evidence to use in their argument piece.
Students will also practice using evidence to create a google drawing poster to support Malala and her campaign for girls’ education.
Next week we will start our mystery and spook literature books and continue with our argument writing work.
The Week in Ms. O’s Room (⅚ Math & Science):
Math 5: Students transitioned from multiplication strategies to division strategies this week. The move was to build some understanding about the relationship between multiplication and division and to use visual models to do this! We modeled using Base Ten pieces, as seen below, and made the relationship between the dimensions of the rectangle and the division bracket (look at the location of the numbers!). The final assessment will be on Tuesday! We will work tomorrow and Monday to review.
Math 6: Students worked their way through many number line problems this week as an introduction to rational numbers. Students learned this week that only rational numbers can be placed on the number line. Rational numbers are a set of numbers that includes whole numbers, fractions, mixed numbers, decimals and integers (+ and -). Numbers that are not included in the rational number set are numbers that are considered non-terminating and non-repeating, like Pi. Otherwise, we can plot them on the number line. So who cares? Well...when students are asked to place numbers on a number line, they must understand how big or how small a number is - know its magnitude. The negative side of the number line poses some challenges to generalizations that students have made for the positive side of the number line, so these conversations were rich. We made a public record with claims about rational numbers, as seen below. There is a lot to think about, as we decide whether these claims are true all the time or just some of the time.
Science ⅚: We wrapped up the Food and Farming unit this week by researching hunger in our Hunger Banquet nation. We are using this research to design an infographic about our country. Students are using Canva, an online graphic design program and will be presenting these on Friday. We also began our new unit on Air, Water, and Weather. We observed an interesting phenomenon related to air and water; we put hot water into a 2 liter bottle and capped it immediately. We watched for about 20 minutes as the bottle imploded into itself. We are using this phenomenon, called our anchoring phenomenon, to learn about the behavior of air and water, so that we can explain basic weather events. There will be more active investigating in this unit and students are preparing for the demands of having materials out, using procedures, drawing models, etc. I have collected their last science notebooks and will be providing feedback so that they know basic expectations of the science notebook for this next unit!
The Week in Mr. Roof’s Room (⅞ Humanities):
ELA: Wow! These students are awesome. We worked hard this week to examine three short stories, and the theme of one in particular: Langston Hughes’ timeless coming of age tale Thank you, Ma’am. Students examined the plot structure and components of these stories, and participated in class discussions and read alouds. We have some talented voice artists who lent their skills to our class, so kudos to them! Students also continued to build their independent reading and vocabulary skills, using reading log 6 as a guide.
Social Studies:
As we continue with our world cultures and religions unit, we’ve focused on the five themes of geography. This will give us a strong foundation upon which to build our knowledge of people and places around the globe. As an introduction, students are using a five themes graphic organizer to conduct brief research around a region of interest to them. This research can be used in the future if students choose, or they can pick a different region when we move on to our culture and religion projects. In addition, each Monday, we try to explore some current events. Typically, we watch CNN 10, and then focus on one story. Students are currently working on summary, and using the 5ws and 1h to help them organize the information.
The Week from Ms. Q’s Room (⅞ Math & Science):
CMP8
We began digging deeper into the meaning of, Line of Best Fit and what linear models tell us. We looked at what slope and the y-intercept mean in the context of the problem and how to find an equation from 2 points or slope and one point. We will be completing this unit over the next week.
CMP7
The 7th grade class explored several different methods of finding the internal sum of the angles of a polygon. We found that dividing figures into triangles works for both irregular and regular figures, and concave and convex figures. By adding up the 180 of each triangle it allowed us to find the total sum of the angles.
We ended the week with categorizing our geometric shape sets to find figures that can tessellate/tile with no gaps and those that don’t. We then began making tessellations that show transformation through flipping, sliding or rotating.
Here are some examples of that from MC Escher tessellations:
Rotation/turning Translation/Slide Reflection/flip
We will be finishing up these and moving onto the properties of triangles.
Science 7th/8th
This week we finished up our Periodic Table of Super Hero’s and Villains. Students shared their work with their colleagues and then reflected on their learning. We will be putting up the Periodic Table next week on our back wall. It was great fun hearing all the “back stories” of these interesting characters that had powers based on their element. Our periodic table will be a great addition to our classroom. We shifted our focus onto the chemical properties of elements with an exciting lab. Using bunsen burners, strikers, nichrome wire and “unknown” elements, we placed samples of the element on the wire and placed them in the flame. 
The electrons in the elements became “excited” by being heated and jumped into a higher energy level. Once the electrons return back to their original level it emits a color that is specific to that element. Students compared answers to see what the mystery elements were. This investigation gave us practice with lab safety and utilizing equipment. Finally, we began to explore chemical reactions, what they are and how you can tell that have have taken place. Next week we will continue our exploration of chemical reactions.
