December 1, 2023

Mushroom hunt 

Currently, there is a mushroom hunt going on for the flamingos. It comprises of a fly agaric mushroom (Or the Red mushroom with white spots 🍄). They will hide randomly on the first floor. This could be the lobby in Flamingo, South Flamingo North, but not the bathrooms or the therapist's office. You won't have to move things to find it. It will hide in an area where you don't have to look very hard but can easily be overlooked like Wally and Waldo (The English variant ). The first person to find this mushroom gets a Hershey's kiss. This will only happen for this one week, and it is very fun that they get to do something like this. 

by Rory

Bridges Art: 

‘Tis The Season 

By Ben

Winter is coming soon, and everyone is getting ready for it. At this time of year, people are starting to wear layers, and the weather is getting colder and darker every day. Sure, by the looks of it, this isn't good news, but these are signs that we are getting close to the holidays! The holiday season in December has not yet come, but Bridges is getting a head start on the festive traditions. We are showing this with Christmas art! In this art activity, we are making different varieties of art, three to be exact. One of these fantastic projects is the clothespin snowman. The clothespin snowman [or at least one of them] is a piece brought back from last year, but now there are 2 different variations of this adorable art. The new variant is a more excellent, more detailed version of the snowman with some new things and some things that were removed. Nevertheless, it still has the same dedication that makes Flamingo art unique. Another art piece we are doing is the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree is actually a bunch of tiny clothespin trees, much like the snowman. The art pieces both have the same art style but are still unique in their way. The trees take teamwork because we make a lot of them at a time. People are assigned different jobs with the trees, making every tree memorable because it is made with so many ideas from so many other people. In conclusion, Christmas art is remarkably special.

Archaic 360 Games (2010)

For Hanukkah this year I was given an Xbox 360 S and I need games. Do any families or students have any Xbox 360 games that you can give to me or game ideas for me to buy from Gamestop? If you do, meet me at Ms. Pritchard’s room from 8:30 - 8:45 12/4/23 - 12/8/23. The game drop off is in a bag held by me at my desk. I will write down game ideas on a paper chart.

-Kalman that has 360 character count for Xbox 360 (not including this or the title)

Art Class: Holidays 

By Madelyn and Tessa

In art class, we are working on snowmen and Christmas trees to decorate the classroom. We made the trees on clothespins. The trees were made of foam. We were painting the snowmen white, and we could take them home when they were done. The trees are for the classroom. In the end, Mrs. Pritchard said we would do a special project if we did well. This is Madelyn and Tessa signing out 

Electives

When you choose an elective for Fridays, you put the number you want with one,  two or three on a piece of paper, the teacher tells you which one you're in and if you're in an elective, then you get to do it. On Fridays we do it and then and then when you're in the elective or the metal active or any of those electives we get to do that. 

When choosing an elective, we are given a sheet, and we number our top choices from one to three. They don't have to be ordered in one, two or three because in the newest elective sheet, they were all put in an order via who said they're elective first and then we had to put it one to three .That was never in order unless we went one, two, three, with the first one, the second one, and the third. Electives we could choose from this week were chess, metal art, Cards, and Paper airplane Workshop.

 By Bryson and Desmond 

Freeze Tag

By Hudson

Fitness has a new game called Freeze Tag. We play freeze tag in the parking lot with a border of cones. Mr. Keenan chooses one kid to be the freezer until they get tired. Then, the process repeats itself until Mr. Keenan says Freeze Tag is over. Freeze tag can get pretty chaotic with one freezer and 29 runners. We're lucky there are minimal injuries! This is Hudson, signing off. See you following Website.

Writing Class

By: Sam S

Hi, I am Sam! Today, I am going to be talking about Writing Class! I am in Mr Keenan’s writing class and we have just started a new IEW. The IEW that we are writing about is called Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Let me explain what an IEW is. IEW stands for Institute of Excellence in Writing. For IEW in our school, we start out with a short story (about a paragraph) of writing on some random topic. In this specific IEW we have to change the story into three sections. We can change it as much as we want as long as we ask first. But we have to change it enough that it doesn't look like copyright. After we complete the rough draft, we do our final draft, which is just an edited version of the rough draft and with better handwriting. And that is pretty much it!

Geography 

by Mati

In Geography, we are learning about countries. So the assignment is to make your own country. You can name it whatever you want. You can also make it whatever shape and size you want. It is also an option to make your very own flag. The shape of the country could be an item or an animal, whatever you want. I am going to name my country Crystal Lake Land. This is me, signing out.

Reading 

By:Theo the reader Ft. Austin 

At Bridges, we have reading groups. I'm in Ms. Hofeld's reading group. Every week in my reading group, we get a story about angry animals. This week, we got an article about Komodo dragons. I learned that komodos, in other words, bite off vital parts like your belly or back and wait til you drop dead, then feast on you, so let's try to avoid death. There will be warning signs, so watch out for them. They live on some islands in Indonesia. 

Austin, who is in Mr. Keenan’s reading group, said “it's fun.” 

Red and Braylee who are in Ms.Pritchard said “It's great.” and as for I'd say “I think my reading group is great.” 

Special thanks to Austin, Red, and Braylee for helping me get more perspectives and to you for reading- tune in next week.

Electives happen every Friday. We get out early on Friday. Also, there's no math on Friday. Also, there's no lunch on  Friday. But you can have a snack. You also get to vote on what elective you do. Here are the electives.

1. Chess With Mr. Keenan

2. Paper airplanes with Mr. E

3. Ticket to Ride with Ms. Jex

4. Cards for people who have Disabilities With Miss Quinter

5. Metal art With Ms. Pritchard

By Eli and Alana

The system of how to get into electives 

By Abby:)

 Everybody likes electives right? So I'm going to tell you how this works and how to get into electives. Now, let's get started! On Tuesday, we gathered upstairs in the main room and sat down. The teachers told us what electives there would be. Mrs. Pritchard asked which teacher wanted to go first, and they announced what elective they were doing and what it was about. Now I am going to tell you what we got to vote about this week. How you vote is you go through your top one, two, and three choices because there are five electives. There will be two remaining. Those are the ones that you don't want to do or are not interested in. The one is for the one that you really want to do. The second one is the second one you want to do, and the third one is the third one you want to do. Here are the electives we got to vote for. The first one is Metal Encaustics. The teacher who is doing that elective is Mrs. Pritchard. The next one is chess. Mr. Keenan is doing that elective. There is card making with Miss Quinter, paper airplanes with Mr. E, and then there's Ticket to Ride with Mrs. Jex. 

The Mushroom Hunt  

We will talk to you about the mushroom hunt. A teacher has the mushroom, and then if you find it you get a prize, but the prize is chocolate, and we're not allowed to have sweets at school so that's a pretty big surprise. Ms. Pritchard or one of the other teachers usually hides it.  It can be anywhere on the first floor. It can be tough to find. You do not have to move anything to find it, and yeah, it's really tiny, though. It's going to be very fun. This is going to be happening for three more weeks. Not everybody is going to get a chance to find it but you know life is life, it's really fun. Anyway, this has been a pleasure talking to you about the mushroom. Goodbye! I hope you enjoy the story and have a good day! It was found in the lobby today.

By Braylee and Red

Social Studies: 

By Nelson

Okay, so you might wonder what Social Studies is. It might sound a little complicated, but it's not. It includes geography the study of maps. In Social Studies we are studying maps, like making maps and much more. It's so fun right now. We are making country maps. Some people are doing some pretty cool ideas, like Skull Island or Parrotlandia. Those are two cool names. We also get to draw our landforms. For example, Skull Island and Parrotlandia are shaped like they sound. Skull Island is shaped like a skull, and Parrotlandia is shaped like a parrot. There are some requirements for the map. You can't just go willy-nilly and do whatever you want. You must have at least three bodies of water (creeks, streams, rivers, and even oceans) and you have to have three landforms like mountains. You must have at least three cities, one capital, and a key or legend. 

Okay, enough about the map, let's talk about the landforms that we're learning about. We're learning so many cool things like how landforms are formed. Some are caused by water erosion, some by wind erosion, and some even by volcanic activity. For example some scientists have found that Hawaii is one of the fastest growing states in the US because of underwater volcanic activity. Okay, now I will name some of these landforms and bodies of water: waterfall, valley, canyon, plain, volcano, island, isthmus, glacier, straight, mesa, bay, lake, harbor, cape, oasis, gulf, cave, cliff, grassland, delta, sand, dune, and those are all the ones that I know. Social Studies is so fun and I hope it continues throughout the year. It's been fun learning about landforms, watching videos, and even making maps. I thank Mr. Keenan for teaching us this.

 Thank you for reading.

                     Ticket to Ride 

By Pachi 

I don't know much about Ticket to Ride but this is what I know about it… Ticket to Ride is a board game Where you have to put down claim cards to get points; it doesn't get more complicated than that ( To be honest I  asked a couple of people what Ticket to ride was about because I haven't played it. I signed up for it for the electives )

I'm going to catch you up later when I play it until then to be continued.

/\Ms Pritchard's Xmas

Ms. Pritchard would like to get some tea for Christmas for sure. Ms Pritchard always appreciates flamingo art, so some flamingo holiday art would be a wonderful decoration for the holidays. A stirling engine based tea bag lowerer would be a fun spectacle around the classroom. A dinosaur flamingo would be perfectly aligned with the age of Ms. Pritchard. Flamingo ornaments would be fun holiday decor. Those ornaments would go really well with a wreath. A student sized flamingo would tower over Ms. Pritchard but would be really fun to add a thing to replace a tree. We could add a flamingo menorah to the classroom. All of this would go well with the holidays, for the classroom and for Ms. Pritchard.

/\

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-Kalman the Jew

Electives

New electives start this week. There are only three weeks because it’s the holidays. Ms. Jex is doing Ticket to Ride again because kids liked it so much. Mr. E is doing an airplane class. Mr. Keenan is doing chess. Mrs. Quinter is making cards, and the cards will go inside a food box to give to homeless people. The last one is Mrs. Pritchard. She is doing metal art. 

by Ethan  

🍄 Mushroom 🍄

This is a very vague title, I’m aware. Ms Pritchard hid a white mushroom with red dots named a Fly Garden mushroom that looks similar to Toad from Mario's head 🍄. The teachers hide the mushroom somewhere downstairs, in the lobby, flamingo north or south. Once a child finds it, they get a prize, in this case, a Hershey's kiss. Now you might have noticed parallels between finding the mushroom, the name for the game we are playing, and finding the pickle that originated in Germany in 1965. In some households, the mother or father hides a pickle ornament on the tree, and the first one to find it gets a prize.  

by Penn   

 Geography 

Hello parents, Abiir here, and welcome to this exciting article about Geography. Now you might have heard of cartography in last month's article, but today I’m going to be talking about the size of a map so here’s an example: Have you heard of google earth? If not, it’s were you zoom in or out but this time we are going to zoom out to see things from a different perspective let’s say you start from your house, you can zoom out a bit to see your neighborhood, third zoom out a little more there’s your city, Fourth zoom out even more than there’s your state, Lastly zoom out a lot there’s your planet which also continent. So there you have it folks that's what the size is of a map, Abiir out 

Freeze Icy

By Freddie the Icecream Cone

I see all of you wonderful people who clicked on this website thinking, “What is Freeze Icy?” Well I'll tell you. I’m talking about freeze tag, or as it is more commonly known, secret agent tag. I'm from the Bridges community. You might have heard about it from one of my other websites by me and Riley called Fantastic Fitness. If you haven't read it, then I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about Fitness.

Now I think it's time to tell you about the secret agent tag. Put simply, there are two hunters, two secret agents, and the rest are just people. The aim for the hunters is to freeze both secret agents than the people. The aim for the secret agents is to revive as many people as possible before time runs out. For the rest of the people, their aim is just don't die. Because if you do, then well... I can only tell you what happens when you are frozen from my experience so I'll tell you a story.

It was a normal day in Fitness when Mr. Keenan called out “NEXT UP IS SECRET AGENT TAG!” I was just a person, and then the whistle sounded, “TWEET!” And the game began. Not two minutes in, the first secret agent was out. Then the second. We had no protection. I ran as fast as I could but it was too late. They tagged me! I felt the heat drain from my body, my blood running cold, and my skin turned from hot and sweaty to cracked and cold. I could feel my heart slowing, my breath going from few to none. As my soul left my cold and stiff body, I accepted my fate as a frozen man. Then the game ended and we went inside. So all's well that ends, I think.  Well, BYE!

No notes today

If you were looking for more, then sorry, you are out of luck.

Stop looking, I'm trying to play Roblox.

Holiday Art

By: Austin

Because it's the holidays, we made🎵 Hoool-i-day arrt 🎵 in art class. The class made both trees and snowmen using paper clips and paper; then the teachers put them around the school. We also made our snowmen (again, with paper clips but painted this time) to bring home. We worked on either trees or snowmen and got called back to go paint our paper clip snowmen to bring home. If both trees and snowmen are full and you’ve done your 2 painted paper clip snowmen, you could do the painted paper clip snowmen for the absent students.

 The Buzz about geography

By Sampson and Ewan

Ewan: Did you have a good week, ladies and gentlemen? Well, Mr. Keenan has introduced many new lessons and stuff to his Geography unit of Social Studies. We’ll explain ‘em all, right here at “The Buzz About Geography!”

The first new topic he introduced was landforms. Now I’ll take it to Sampson to explain what landforms are. 

Sampson: Thank you, Ewan! Landforms are basically-erm-I guess you can call them landmarks, because we have volcanoes, rivers, lakes, deserts, tundra, forests, and we also have beaches and other stuff that are easy to pinpoint. They're basically any type of structure that is made by Mother Nature that was not originally there. So, in all technicality, if you're wondering, yes! Islands are a type of landform. They become themselves after a long time. Volcanoes started as tiny hills and grew to be volcanoes like beaches and deserts. Here’s a fun fact about deserts! They actually were once a ginormous river-or the ocean-and the rocks on the shore were being smashed together over and over and over to create sand. Same with beaches. Over to you, Ewan! 

Ewan: Thank you, Sampson! There are tons of other landforms (canyon, oceans, plateaus, bacon, etc. (Sorry, I must have been a bit hungry.), but I can’t get to them all right now, so see Different types of landforms for more. So let’s move on to-drumroll, please-

MAPMAKING!!!

Mapmaking is a fun fact of my favorite passions, and Mr. Keenan has incorporated many types of landforms. We also talked about the surround effect; which basically states that every you is inside a house, every house is on a street , every street is inside a neighborhood and every neighborhood is inside a city and every city is inside a county and every county is inside a country and eve…

(Sorry, I got tired.) Now over to you, Sampson, to explain our mapmaking project.

Sampson: Our project is so far we're just making drafts of a type of landform that we are going to make a civilization and it will have three bodies of water (at least), one capital, four other cities (at least), and we will afterward make our final draft of it, so we can RULE A KINGDOM! MUAHAHA!!! (Sorry. I got a little carried away with my role-playing.)

Ewan: Well, that’s it for this week’s “The Buzz about Geography”! Thank you for reading, thanks especially to the assistant host of THE BUZZ-Sampson-, for all the viewers, please rate how this episode did from 1-10, and I’ll see you real soon! 

Ewan: Great work, everyone, time to wrap it up.

Production Manager: Ewan, can I go to a landform now? 

Ewan’s eye starts twitching uncontrollably. 

There's Not Mushroom for the Mushroom Challenge 

By Riley, Interview by Freddie

In the Flamingo classrooms, there's an interesting… challenge? Puzzle? Search? Whatever it is, our goal is to find the hidden mushroom. The mushroom can be hidden anywhere downstairs by Mrs. Pritchard or Mr. Keenan. If you, by any chance, find the mushroom, go up to a teacher and quietly say, “I found the mushroom!” Don't touch the mushroom, don't touch items trying to find it, don't touch items while trying to find items to touch to find the mushroom, don't touch items to–you know what? I'm done. If you spot the mushroom, tell a teacher quietly and, if you are the first to find the mushroom, you will get a prize. BUT–if you're actively looking for the mushroom A.K.A., looking around as you're walking through the room, trying to spot the red glow of that mushroom. Also, find the sweet, detectable smell– you know what? I'm deleting that whole section. ANYWAY… I'm going to ask Mr. Keenan whether I can interview somebody. Freddie! Yes! Entering interview mode. PSSSSHHHHHH 

Riley: What were you doing when you first found this mushroom? 

Freddie: I was sitting on my tushy reading, and then later Mrs. Hofeld asked if you guys found the mushroom or not. I was like, “You mean that one over there, hanging from the fishing net hanging from the ceiling and told me to go–” 

Riley: I don't need to hear your entire life story!! What did you think of the prize you got for finding the mushroom? 

Freddie: It was chocolate.

Riley: So… it was just chocolate.

Freddie: Yeah!!! That prize was–

Riley: But what's your opinion on the priz– 

Freddie: INTERVIEW OVER!!! Get off my lawn!!! 

That was a quick interview with Freddy. (Sorry, I had to end.) That is a… well… interesting summary of finding the mushroom. Anyway, that's all the information I have today about the mushroom, but there’ll probably be mushrooms for more next week. (Sorry for all the terrible mushrooms. I couldn't help it.) This was Riley reading from the news– not repeating every word of a newspaper I read– yeah, totally not–and bye.

Our Countries 

By Dylan

In Geography, we were tasked with making our own countries. They could be whatever shape or size. You can create states, you can make the landscapes, and the bodies of water. I also guess you could make a five-story Burger King if you wanted. I don't know why you would want to, but you can. You can even make your own flag if Mr. Keenan permits you. Your country could be the shape of the Eiffel Tower, or it could look like a microwave. The choice is all yours. It would help if you had a pencil and a piece of paper. We also need to make a scale and a compass rose to show how big the country is, and also what directions are what. You make a key so that people know rivers are rivers and not a bunch of giant blue highways. You can make a certain area a desert or snowy, you can even make it a jungle. If you want to, you can make your own state names. They could be creative, they could be unique, or they could be Washington spelled backward. I'm looking forward to finishing this project and you should try doing it yourself.

Reading

  By Daniel

Every morning after we get to school, we go to reading class. We were reading about a man-eating dragon, and the story teaches us what Komodo dragons are like. We are also reading a book called Unbroken. The book is about a guy named Louis who was a thief when he was a kid but ended up becoming a fighter pilot in World War II. Before we do all these activities, we do a warmup or read. Right now, we're doing a winter-themed crossword. I interviewed someone about this subject. Freddie thinks it is a good time. But that is all I have for now. Have a fantastic day!

Science

Replanting and Trimming

29/11/23

By Sam L.

In Science, we have been learning about how to replant a plant. There are many ways, but we are only learning one. It is called propagation. It is where you cut segments out of the plant that have not already sprouted and bury them. The segments grow roots to become a whole new plant. We are still waiting for our sample to grow. While we wait, we practice moving plants from one size of clay pot to another. One reason to do so is if the roots are wrapping around the inside of the clay pot. This isn't good, and you don't want it to happen. But when we move the plant, we get as much soil out of the roots as possible before replanting. Then we plant a bigger clay pot in some fresh soil there. In between, we spread out the roots so it is not circling, which is bad for it. Another thing we are learning is how you would properly trim a plant. This is when we trim leaves and even whole stem segments. You can kill it incorrectly, but if done correctly, you can save it. To do it correctly, you only cut dead stem parts and some hanging stem parts. The stem can also hang toward the sun. This is bad because if you don't turn the plant, it will hang toward the sun. But if you turn the plant, And all the sides see the sun, the stem doesn’t hang but goes up like it is supposed to. But if it leans, you may have to cut it so it stops leaning. When it leans to one side, the roots can not hold the plant up. And that is unhealthy to the plant. That is what we have been learning about in Science.