Like the rest of the school year, the final quarter was packed with fun events! We continue to post information about events in the weekly newsletters, Raven website/calendar, Facebook, and Instagram, so it is easy to find details about all the fun to get involved in daily. We are collecting feedback and ideas for next year, and always appreciate collaboration with families, so if you haven’t been attending our monthly PAC meetings, we encourage you to start joining us. Every voice matters!
Competitions
Our IditaRead Race finished up very well with 28 kids out of 40 participants crossing the finish line by reading and tracking 8 hours (PreK-2nd) or 16 hours (3rd-12th) along the Iditarod trail.
Clubs
Our Adventures in Bookland Book Club continued to read great books this spring including The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street in March, Island of the Blue Dolphins in April, and Charlotte’s Web in May. Katie did an amazing job this year with all of the thematic food, activities, and take-home goodies to make this club a huge success! We will miss her next year.
We have a great time at Lego Club each month building creatively, sharing projects, and enjoying time together. In March, we had a broad theme of “green” and challenged the kids to creatively incorporate something green into their build. April saw us building a mini city block, and May was filled with insects as we enjoyed a spring theme. It is fun to see the creations displayed for the month for students to enjoy viewing between club meetings.
Middle school students enjoyed the hands-on activities at Math Club each month, including a fun escape room in April where they had to solve mathematical problems to get the clues they needed to break out of the room.
The kids have a good time every other week during Pokemon Club where they get to trade cards and battle together. They even have tournaments with prizes regularly.
Chess Club continues to be a lively group each week and we expanded our club to include an online component so kids can play together even if they can’t come into the office for the meetings. They learn strategies and practice skills, as well as enjoying playing matches together. It is a good opportunity to hone your skills if you like this game.
Marvelous Mondays/Science Fridays
Our spring Marvelous Mondays were well attended and we had a lot of fun with a variety of activities. In March, we did escape rooms with each of the groups which proved to be no match for the skilled puzzle solvers that we have at Raven. For April, we continued and expanded on the coding theme from our AMP IT UP Camp to give kids more opportunities to practice these skills while having fun doing so. May was a very energetic theme of photo scavenger hunts around the office where students raced to accomplish tasks to earn points for their team, then we enjoyed viewing all the photos and videos at the end of the activity.
The kids get to do super cool projects and experiments every other week during Science Fridays. In March, the kids learned about flight through building paper airplanes, making paper rockets, and shooting balloon rockets through hoops. April continued the flight theme with kites, then morphed into an assortment of fun projects like building a solar eclipse viewer, watching colors separate on a coffee filter, and mixing up their own slime. May finished up the science fun as students learned about light reflection/refraction as they built their own periscopes, and even gave a nod to “May the 4th be with you” when they assembled their own hovercraft using balloons and CD’s. We really appreciated all the time and effort that Donna put into these fun activities each month and they will be missed next year.
Other Recurring Activities
A number of our regularly occurring activities continued through the spring including Girls’ Gathering, Lunch Bunch, monthly Popcorn and Pajama Movie Parties, Morning Mug Parent Book Club, monthly PAC Meetings, and Senior Meetings. These are all great activities to encourage connection between students and parents alike.
This year’s DARE class taught by JPD officers wrapped up this spring and was a valuable class for all those who attended. We were excited to celebrate Oliver earning the medal for the best essay for their final project.
Field Trips/One-time Events
Pi Day is a tasty activity that we enjoy in March, and this year was no different. We had a good sized group of kids celebrating this mathematical marvel, and we enjoyed a whole assortment of interactive activities together on this special day.
Our three-day Amazing Math Plus Information Technology and Understanding Programming (AMP IT UP) Camp went wonderfully at the end of March. We had thirty-six K-8th grade students participating along with several high school helpers and parents as we studied numbers, shapes, coding, science concepts, and many other topics in fun hands-on ways. The snack and lunch breaks were even a blast as students got time to socialize between organized activities, and they earned cool brag tags for each of the sessions that they attended.
We got two special visits in April. One was from High school counselor Ryan who came down for a week to work with students individually to help with their high school and beyond planning. He also hosted an Intro to High School Workshop for prospective and current families with students nearing high school, and took a group of students on a tour of the Juneau Job Center. Another visit was from our superintendent and some of our school board members, and it was fun to get to show them around our new office with our added space for activities.
During our Spring Open House, we got to visit with a number of prospective families who are considering homeschooling for the 24/25 school year. It was also a great opportunity to have representatives from UAS and the National Guard set up informational tables to share their offerings with students.
Another special event in April was a tour organized by our new family liaison for families to tour a Coast Guard cutter. Many questions were asked and answered as two groups of students were guided through the ship. It was a very exciting experience for many of them.
At the end of April, we celebrated the completion of standardized testing with a Friday Family Fun Day. First we had a pizza party at the pool where we got to play games and chat while the food settled, then we headed next door to the Field House for some fun free-play together. We finished off the day with a movie party at the office complete with comfy seats and lots of popcorn and treats. It was a huge event that was a likewise huge success.
NOAA hosted two Sea Week events for us for both elementary and middle school students, and we had a record turnout for both. The kids enjoyed learning about many different sea creatures while exploring the facility and engaging in hands-on activities. It was a big hit!
Of course, one of our biggest highlights of the spring is our High School Graduation where we get to celebrate the accomplishments of our students who have completed their coursework to earn their diplomas. This year, we had 21 students participate in our ceremony which was our largest group to walk from the Juneau office to date. We had about 250 people in attendance, and broadcast the ceremony so that many more were able to watch virtually even though they couldn’t make it in person. One special aspect of graduation this year was that our graduation speaker was a Raven 2004 graduate, encouraging this class of students 20 years after he graduated through an assortment of celestial body analogies to remember that “it’s all about you” and “it’s not all about you.”
