The Weekly Newsletter
Week 27, April 17-21
Welcome back everyone! We had a great week back from break with a fresh start back into the new session and many new launches. Here is a look into our week and all the new stuff we started!:
The navigators launched their personal finance quest! This quest will cover everything that a young person wants and needs to know about finances. For everyone that has wondered: How do I balance a checkbook?, What is stock?, How do I prepare for the future and become a financially responsible adult?….and many more!….this quest will explore. This week, the students learned about their money personalities by taking a quiz to see if they are more of a spender, a hoarder (saver), or somewhere in the middle. We also learned about the stock market and what it means to invest. This is going to be such a fun quest, and we couldn’t think of a better time for everyone to be exposed to this world of finance!
The foundation studio launched their physics quest! They are very excited for this exploration into the laws of physics, as they’ve watched the other studio have a blast with this quest and do fun activities with it this year.
Mid-week we launched a course all about developing your web presence. A huge thanks to Russ for leading this launch for us! We are so excited for the weeks to come as we will be offering two different technology classes. Developing Your Web Presence will explore the world wide web and VR (plus much, much more!). And our after school Computational Literacy class builds skills in data science, algorithmic thinking, AI/Machine Learning, enhanced pattern recognition and probability assessments. It will cover the basics of computational literacy, and at the end each participant will be able to become confident and proceed in whatever path they choose in life!
We launched a new session of art! We are really excited to have a new art guide at our school- Charlie! The Eagles will be learning all about drawing this session. Without giving too much away (the end project is a surprise!), they will learn about different drawing techniques like gesture drawing and still life drawing and then transition into screen printing. The students will have the opportunity to create their own awesome designs by the end of the session.
For writer’s workshop, the foundation studio launched their biography quest! For this writing quest, each student will choose a hero they want to honor and dedicate their writing for the next six weeks on. We will go through the writing process in depth as well as learn the thorough ins and outs of research.
Writing workshop for navigator this week was the launch in journalism! The students will dive into the world of news….What is it? What is fake and what is real? How do you write a truly informational piece without putting your personal opinion into it? This will be a journey as there are many imaginative fiction writers here at our school, so this will be a fun and challenging shift in writing style!
This week in our history book, our protagonist had dinner with Joseph Stalin…so we learned about him! We also researched The Kremlin and The Gulag camps. It was a fun, and dark, week in history!
In history for foundation, the students learned all about the end of the Persian Empire and the many conflicts leading up to World War 1. They did an activity to see what it would be like on a British Naval ship, and the major differences between a ship ran on coal and a ship ran on oil.
At the end of the week we had an Earth Day celebration! The students got into teams and did mini-research projects on bodies of water throughout the world. We then played Earth Jeopardy…the winning team was Reese, Violet, and Ryan…congrats!
We hope you have a good weekend and will see you on Monday!
