The Weekly Newsletter
Week 29, May 1- 5
Welcome back! We had another successful week with lots of work that got done with a healthy balance of fun that was had 🙂 The quests have been full of challenges mixed with big strides and goals met. Here’s a look at some highlights from the week:
The navigators have been continuing their journey as news reporters. One of their challenges this week was to analyze a real news article and talk about the prominent news values in the piece. The other challenge was to write about an event from their weekend as a breaking news piece.
In writing workshop with the foundation studio, the students learned all about paraphrasing. Research is a very detailed and specific process, especially in the way we honor and respect the sources we get our information from. Writing a biographical research piece relies heavily on note taking and recording sources (in our case, mostly from websites), and we practiced all of that this week.
The personal finance quest with the navigators was quite the experience this week! For this challenge, the students wrote pitches for their ideal jobs out of college. The twist was that their chances were 50/50 of getting said job. Just like in the real world, getting the job you are after is hard. There are so many other qualified candidates and competition is close. It was a tough realization and there were many let-downs. It was a hard but important exercise and lesson.
In navigator history, the main character of our book has found himself in Bali taking a vacation with the fictional Herbert Einstein, and this week we got to read all about their adventures in Southeast Asia. They learned all about the Balinese caste system, Hinduism, and the civil war in Bali between the communists and non-communists.
For the physics quest, our Foundation students tested our acceleration based on the weight of an object. They also learned about fulcrums and how moving them can help lift heavier items.
In Foundation history, they studied the Russian revolution and the end of WWI. One of the coolest things… they learned about Alexei Nikolaevich and his hemophilia- and did an experiment showing how hemophilia works.
In the “managing your online presence” seminar, the kids learned more about internet safety and how anything we put there is a way for others to gain info. They also went deeper into developing their own websites!
We ended the week with a Cinco De Mayo celebration! Dani gave us a fun and informative mini-history lesson on the holiday, and we were all surprised to learn that it is only celebrated in a select few areas….the US being one of them!
See you on Monday!
