Welcoming New Friends Into the Upcoming Year of ImpACT

It was exciting to see brand new faces of students and staff joining us as we launched into a new term!  Along with Garfield and Franklin, we are excited to partner with Ruby Bridges Elementary School in Alameda this year. A total of over 90 second-graders registered, many of whom were with us for SummerFest about a month ago. Much of the excitement from SummerFest carried over to the first day of ImpACT, as we saw from the expressions on everyone’s faces.

We prepared for three new classes to kick off the first day. For the next three weeks, we will learn about the solar system, the human skeletal structure, and Haiku poems. In the class on solar systems, we began by watching a magnificent slideshow of the stars and planets in the galaxies. We learned one interesting fact about each of the nine planets (or rather, eight, since Pluto is no longer one). We ended by pasting all the planets to a large piece of construction paper in order of their location from the sun. In the class on the human skeletal system, we learned the different parts of the human bone structure like the cranium, femur, and patella by looking at a real human skeleton. In addition, we had a lot of fun watching a School House Rocks video that helped us remember the different parts.  And last, but not least, in the Haiku class, we learned the structure behind Haiku poems, such as the number of syllables in each line. We, then, collaborated as a class to come up with a poem before writing our own individual ones on pretty scrolls of paper.

The first day was packed with a lot of fun and we look forward to getting to know one another in the weeks ahead.