November 2, 2023

We are better together

We love celebrating with all of our community!

Blue Bags!

By Daniel


While most schools do fundraisers, here at Bridges we just need you to donate the cans you have at home. Some students have been bringing in cans that they've been collecting with their blue bags. Mrs. Pane at the front desk has been giving them out. We will use the money that is made from the cans for art supplies and activities such as the Halloween party we had. This is amazing because you'll be able to help the school get more art supplies and other things that we may need. Your parents can help by asking about the blue bags and having your kid pick up the bags from school and bring them home. Recently a student brought in four entire bags of cans, which was baffling! The teachers were so surprised as well and I interviewed some people about this. The first person I interviewed was Mr. Keenan. He said, “It is a great opportunity for families to help make sure we have supplies.” The best part is this will go on for the entire year, which is amazing. And something even better is that from “November 15th to December 2nd we will get a 20% boost for blue bags, so please bring your bags here” - Mrs. Pane. But unfortunately, that's all I have for now. Have an amazing day!


TICKET TO RIDE EUROPE:

SHORT BUT SWEET

BY EWAN

So… hello again. The last time I did the Ticket to Ride elective, I tried out an entirely NEW version, this time set in Europe. The rules are basically the same, but there are three major differences to the rules: 

WARNING!!

 You never know what outcome you’ll get when you place tunnel pieces!

 Yes, and—

You need to have more locomotives of the required color than it calls for.

 Yeah, but—

If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to complete the tunnel, but if you’re unlucky, you might need to find another route to your destination.

 Okay, but–

Unless you’re in Zurich. Tunnels surround Zurich on all sides.

*whew* Public service announcement.

 Anyway, the last major change is:

Train stations are quite a handy tool. For example, let’s say you need to get from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg, but another player (let’s call him Bob) has already claimed the fastest route from Stockholm to St. Petersburg. Now let’s say you’re really impatient, and you don’t want to go the longer route. Well, what you could do is place one of your train stations at either end of the route that Bob claimed.

 This means that you reclaim the route Bob claimed. Then Bob sees what you did, and he runs away in fear. (Actually, I made the last part up.)

There’s not much more to explain, because when I played, my new company (Inter-Alp Railways) only made it from Zurich to Budapest (via Venice and Zagreb) before it was time to go.

 A lot more will probably happen next week, and I can’t wait to see what it’ll be!

-EWAN, PRESIDENT OF INTER-ALP RAILWAYS

 

Halloween Games

1/11/23 (British format)

By Sam L.


For Halloween this year, after Reading and Math we did some games. Every teacher except Mrs. Pritchard had a game. Mrs. Pritchard was taking pictures of us during the games. Before the games, we split up into five groups. Each group had a leader with a piece of paper saying what game we would do, with which teacher, and in what order. The games were Frisbee with Mrs. Jex, Charades with Mrs. Quinter, Bowling/Halloween Cups/Tic Tac Toe with Mr. L, Eye Balancing Races with Mr. E, and Pumpkin Pendulum with Mr. Keenan. My group did the games in that order. The Frisbee game was frisbee golf with seven checkpoints which you had to get in order. To get to a checkpoint, you had to hit the witch hats that were on the ground. Mrs. Jex labeled the witch hat with the numbers. Charades are, as you can expect, were Charades, Halloween edition. Bowling/Halloween Cups/Tic Tac Toe were fun. For bowling, you had two little balls that you would roll at some cones. You would have your bowler and one person to set the pins. After one person was done, they would change positions. Halloween cups were a set of cups together like bowling pins you would have two people try to get three balls in the cups. Whoever had the most balls in the other side's cups at the end won. For Tic Tac Toe, you had four bean bags that you would try to get in the square to win. The table was flat though and if the bean bag slid off, it was the other person's turn. But if your bag landed in a square that the other person had a bag in, you went again. But if the other person had all four of their bags out and you didn't, when it was your turn, the game ended if your bag went off the table. For Eyeball Balancing Races, you would have three people race. But they would have eyeballs on spoons and they would have to balance the eyeballs. If your eyeball fell off, you would have to stop, pick it up, and put it back on before continuing the race. For Pumpkin Pendulum Mr. Keenan would split us into two teams and the teams would compete. They were competing at knocking down cones and bottles of water in sixty seconds. You would have to knock them down with a pumpkin attached to your head with a stocking. Whoever knocked the most down, won. I knocked all of them down with twenty seconds to spare! Then we went in and got our stuff and as we left we got candy! That is what we did for Halloween.


Halloween Party Games

by Mati


At the Halloween party, we played Charades. Charades is a game where there are a bunch of people sitting. One person draws a random thing and that person has to act like the thing you drew.  The first person to guess the thing you drew wins. We made it Halloween-themed. That was my favorite game we played.



🎃 The Halloween Party 🎃

By: Austin


The Halloween party was really fun. There were 5 groups; mummies, skeletons, bats, ghosts, and last but not least, witches. I was in Witches with Theo and Mia. There were also 5 games. I’ll tell you in the order I played them in; 

FRISBEE GOLF, where we throw rings onto hats.

 BOWLING/TIC TAC TOE/BALL TOSS, where we did bowling, tossed bean bags onto a table and hoped they landed on an empty square and tossed balls and hoped to get them to; land in or knock over cups, I don’t know which.

 Then THE EGG RACE, but we replaced the eggs with plastic eyeballs. Afterward, we did CHARADES, where the acting out was all Halloween-themed.

 And finally, THE PUMPKIN PENDULUM, where we wore silly hat things and tried to knock more stuff over than the other person by using the pumpkin in the silly hat things. My favorite game was either charades or frisbee golf, I can't decide which I like more. We also got to wear our costumes. I was a cat, along with 4 or 5 other people. There also were; a couple of grim reapers, 2 knights, a mushroom, and many many more costumes that would take all day to list. Just before we left, we walked in a circle around the bottom level of the school and collected candy from the teachers before leaving the school out the front door.


Halloween Party 

By Nelson

 Halloween just passed and you also may know that Halloween was on a school day, so we had a Halloween party. You might wonder how that works. You're not supposed to play games at school, have candy at school, or even have fun at school *wink*. But actually, the Halloween party was super fun. We played many games. I'll name a couple of my favorites. Mr. L had mini bowling, Halloween Pong, where you throw ping-pong balls into little cups, and bean bag Tic Tac Toe, which happens to be one of my favorite games. And at the end of the party, we even got little goodie bags. To sum it all up Halloween is an amazing holiday even at school. How much candy did you get to thank everybody who made these Halloween festivities possible?

 Thanks for reading. 


Teaching With RTX On

Our Chromebooks are complete garbage. They have two measly gigabytes of RAM, a great standard RAM for 2004. A two-year-old with no education could build a better computer than Google. At my home before the summer of 2023, my home computer had a GT 635 from 2013, and it could still outpace a Chromebook. Now I have a budget RTX 3050. It was only $232 and goes in cheap laptops that are around $1,000 each. Chromebooks have a 16-bit processor, and the default for 2023 is 64 bits, Chromebooks are awful, switch to Windows Bridges.

-Meanie Kalman


Trick or School

By Dylan


Today I will be talking about my favorite activities from Halloween. First of all pumpkin pendulum is this game we have to knock over cones and bottles with a pumpkin on our head. We can't use our hands or our legs. Whichever team either knocks down the most bottles or cones wins. Halloween charades is pretty simple, it's exactly what you would have expected. It's just Charades with Halloween themes. Although it was still really fun guessing random stuff when we were really confused. I forgot the name of one activity so I'm just going to call it the Halloween Carnival. It has three activities. The first is a bean bag with Tic-tac-toe, you have to throw bean bags in the spaces. If you throw your bean bag on somebody else's square then it's a do-over and you have to throw again. If it falls off of the table then you lose your turn and when it lands on a line you put it in the square that it landed closest to. There was also Halloween bowling, it was the same as normal bowling but the pins were Halloween-themed. I forgot the name of the third one so I'm just going to call it ball in the cup. Basically, you have to bounce a ping pong ball at least once off the table and it has to land in a cup. You get a limited number of balls and that's all. And those were my favorite Halloween activities.



Halloween Party at BMS

By: Sam S. & Rory M.


Yesterday was the Halloween party at BMS. It was so much fun. We had to go through half the day before we got to the party after lunch. However, reading math and writing were pretty different. At a reading in Mr. Keenan's class, we read a Tell-Tale Heart. At math we got to do a math mystery which is where using a bunch of math equations we get to gradually fill in the numbers to get Clues to who has turned the child’s into a pumpkin. In writing, we got to tell a bunch of our spooky stories and listen to somebody read a story called click clack the rattle bag (click The A To watch the story it is a very good a). After writing we had lunch recess and quiet time which was kind of used to help people get into their costumes then it started. There were five stations. About 20 minutes for each and we got to go trick or treating which is where the teachers and some kids handed out candy and other stuff. We were all in different groups so we did different stations for each group, but eventually, everyone got through all the stations. The first station my group went to was Mr. Keenan’s station. The station was called the pumpkin pendulum. For the station, we put a small Pumpkin into a pair of nylons (the nylons were not used). We hung the nylons on our heads and swung the pumpkin to knock down bottles full of “blood” and cones. There were two groups of kids in the station. The groups were competing. We raced back and forth on both teams and whoever's team finished first wins. The second station was an eyeball race led by Mr Ekstrom. Our group stood in a line and Three people at a time would race with a plastic eyeball on a spoon. If the eyeball were to fall off of someone's spoon You would have to stop and pick it up and you can't walk when the eyeball is not on the spoon. You would have to stop. The third station was a station led by Mr Lautenbach. This station was a mix of a few different things. There was bowling, tic-tac-toe with beanbags, and ping-pong cups. Ms Quinter did charades which is where we got to do a bunch of spooky things like going through a corn maze, trick or treating, and being a zombie,  it was really fun But some of them are super hard. Miss Jex did frisbee golf which is where we got to have a frisbee and a bunch of spooky witch hats and we had to throw the frisbee onto the hat. The 7 holes were really fun. In the end, we got to play a kind of mini-game of cornhole with a small disc considering we had extra time. Pumpkin. 


Coding class

This article is about a class that I am hoping for. Currently as I’m writing this (11-2-23) we just finished our Google drawings lesson in IT class. Hopefully we will be doing coding in class. But we will probably be learning Javascript, and I want to learn the basic coding language so I can program games for my dad’s old Atari 800. Another good language to learn would be either C++ or C# so we can code games in unity. That would make a great lesson.

Something that I’ve been really hoping to learn is to burn a program on a compact disc (CD) or a DVD. Xbox 360 games are on discs that work a little bit differently than most Xbox discs. So I want to be able to play a PC game on my Xbox 360. It would be a really fun and useful class to take in school (just the coding part, nobody cares about discs anymore but me).

-Coder Kalman

{The Halloween party (or just Halloween at Bridges.) } 

By: Theo the real one really trust me, please 

For Halloween we had a party for (almost) all the afternoon. There were 5 games, each one rotating for one of 5 groups. My group was the witches. My group played ring toss + bean bag tic-tac-toe\bowling\eye toss into a cup thing and charades and eyeball race and the pumpkin pendulum game. Now you may wonder what these are. This next part is for explaining what the games are. Ring toss is a game where you toss rings at witches’ hats. Austin said, “It was perfect 10\10!” (Oh yay!) Ms Jex taught it in the bark chip zone. Next is a bean bag toss. You will rotate between bean bag tic-tac-toe and bowling eye toss thing. Red said “It was pretty fun” and I would agree with that. Next was Charades with Mrs. Quinter. I did “lost in a corn maze" and people couldn’t figure it out at first but eventually did. For the eyeball (ping-pong ball) race, we raced with spoons and tried to not let the eyeballs fall. In the pendulum game, we had to put nylons with pumpkins on our heads and use them to knock down blood bottles and cones.   

My favorite game was definitely Charades. I will see you next time! 


Indoor Fitness- Mr Keenan 

By Abby 


We all like to go outside for Fitness otherwise known as PE at some other schools. PPS (Portland Public Schools) has gone on strike today. This means they do not have Fitness, they do not have to learn and they do not have to go to school at all. I consider them lucky because I wanted to do candy trading with my brother because it was Halloween and I really want to trade candy with my brother. If it is raining for Outdoor Fitness, we have to do indoor Fitness which is upstairs in a big area for where we can do indoor Fitness. Really I think it's yoga because we're stretching and not doing as many more exciting activities as we went outside but that's just my opinion. I will talk about the things we do from indoor Fitness and what the differences are but there are a few good things about indoor Fitness. 

Now I will talk about the stretches we will do. We usually start with a sun salutation. At the beginning of the sun's salutation, we have to start by putting our arms up in the air but not putting them right next to our ears. We want the most but not too loose. We have to reach up for the ceiling but Mr Keenan likes to call it “reach for the sky”. Then we have to bend forward and try to touch our toes. But if you can't touch your toes, you can spread your legs out a little and that is okay if you can't touch your toes while your legs are in a straight position. But if you don't want to touch your toes, you can put your arms together and swing side to side. Mr Keenan says it revolves around your shoulders or If you are hunched over your computer all day long. After we touch our toes, we walk with her hands forward and go into a plank position. That is where you are flat on your stomach and your arms are upwards. Knees, chest, and chin. Then you transition into Cobra and upward-facing dog. Then you transition into a downward dog which is where it is the opposite of Cobra and upward upward-facing dog. It is like you make a triangle shape. Then you step or jump to a forward bend. And then Mr Keenan added a child's pose to the sun salutation. What was your favorite part of the sun salutation? I don't really like a child's pose. It's not my favorite but it could be somebody else's favorite. 

And then sometimes we will do a few stretches from outdoor Fitness but we don't do all of them because it might make too much noise for Mrs. Pane. We sometimes do frog jumps. They are you squat down like a frog and then leap upwards with your arms in the air and then you jump like a frog. Frog jumps replaced Mario jumps but we still do Mario jumps sometimes. Mario jumps are when you squat down well you have your arm and then you have your hands in a fist and they jump upward. If we are outside we can make the noises that Mario makes from the old game. The sound sort of sounds like this ” Yahoo!” But if we are inside we cannot make too much noise for Mrs. Pane because she has to work at the front office all day long. Sometimes we will do Frankenstein's when you kick your leg in front of you and you try to kick up as high as you can. Sometimes Mr Keenan says we can do it across, meaning we do opposite legs and arms, say my left arm and then my right arm. We also do a squat. Y'all know what a squat looks like? Sometimes kids don't want to put their arms in front of them. I put them in my class and find them on my chest and then I do a squat. Mr Keenan says he wants to get a 90° angle. “Imagine you're sitting in a chair,” Mr Keenan says. We also do high knees. You can put your hands to your waistline and have your hands smack your knees if you want to. I don't do it but some other students may do it. We also do butt kickers which are the opposite of high knees and it is where you “kick your butt”. If you cannot kick your butt that is fine. It is sort of like a run-in-place thing. 

After we do all that we have usually five or three minutes of quiet time. That is where you can lay down crisscross applesauce or you can just sit and wait. It is where we can relax and Mr Keenan will put on a meditation that will talk about being calm and usually, I lay down. 

And then at the very end if we have time we will play a game. It will be either a quiet ball or four corners. Quiet ball is when you have to pass the ball around to students and not say a word and you have to be completely 100% silent. You can do hand motions but you can't whisper or try to talk in any other way. You can do hand motions and point to other students but you cannot speak. 

Now I'm going to talk about four corners, that is where the teacher or one of the students who had won in the previous round of Four Corners will be in the center of the square. They count to 10 seconds and everybody tries to be as silent as a mouse and get into a corner. If you are in the corner that the person in the middle points to that means you are out. If you stomp in one corner and then quickly switch to another corner that would break our core value of integrity. If you stop very loudly and stand in that spot you are also not following the core values. If you trip somebody or they are switching a corner and they hit the ground very loudly and then you run away from the crime scene you are breaking the core value of compassion and integrity! If you are the last person standing you are the winner of Four Corners! If we finish everything that we talked about before I talked about the games, we could put another round. But that is about a 70% chance of that happening. The winner will be the person who has to be in the middle next time. I hope you get to do some yoga in your room. See you next time!


Carnivorous plants



Carnivorous plants are plants that eat bugs. Venus flytraps wait for bugs to land on them and then close their mouths once they catch a bug and then digest it. The reason they do this is because the place that they grow Has very poor Mineral-wise soil so they have to get energy. Now that seems very simple for a living thing to do but when you think about it, that trap has to close to eat a bug before the bug escapes. Most plants take around 2 weeks to make a single flower open! And if you think about it even more you realize how the plant knows that a bug is on it because plants don't have nervous systems ( as of 2023 11\2\2023 ) so let's see how it actually works well it turns out the plant is really smart Is he Venus fly traps know that there's prey on their traps by little tiny hairs known as trigger hairs. and this is the most interesting part when a bug touches the trigger hair it does not immediately close it counts… yes it counts the Venus flytrap counts to 10 before closing on its victim which is a plant Counting. Some other plants however don't need to count. A perfect example of this is a picture plant. A picture plant funnily enough looks like a picture and has a nectar that is produced inside of it that smells fantastic to a bug and they want to drink it because they're bugs and they want the food. Little do they know the picture plant's nectar is kind of like alcohol to bugs it also tastes superb so the bugs now wanting more of the nectar go inside the plant which is where there's the most nectar however the walls are very slippery and they fall into a pit of acid Where they die. California picture plants also known as Cobra lilys look like a cobra where the bug flies into a mouth in the shape of a cobra they work similarly to picture plants. 


By Eli and Rory



Women's history 

For the next few week I (Pachi) am going wright a review about Women history books, today I am going to tell you the story of Amelia Earhart.


Amelia Earhart was one of the first women in history to fly an airplane, and one the first tomboys, Amelia was born July 24th 1897, She was named after both of her grandmas Amelia Otis and Mary Earhart. Edwin Earhart ( Amelia Earhart's dad ) was poor when he met Amy Otis ( Amelia Earhart's mom ) so Alfred Otis  did the father a thing and did not approve their relationship until Edwin Earhart went to a job and at least got $50 a month It took 5 years to get all the money he needed to get approved by Alfred Otis To marry his daughter.




To be continued




Candy November

By the time of writing this article it is November 1st, 2023, and yesterday was Halloween. On Halloween you get candy, hopefully not Michael Myers, but people get a lot of candy that they are just aching to eat. A Bridges rule is no candy in class, but I got 8.4 pounds of pure candy, and we are not allowed to eat it for most of our day. We could each get even a single piece of candy per lunch per day in the month of November. Just a single piece would be nice and fair. We need students to band together and get SOME CANDY!!!!!!!!!!!!

 We need at least 12 signatures, sign on the table below

-congressman kalman

Kalman

Pendleton

Ewan

Austin

Red

Bryson

Desmond

Braylee

Mrs. Hofeld

Eli

Rory :)

Ethan

Sam S.

Abiir

Tennyson


Bridges Middle School: Post Halloween

By Ben

As the night of trick or treating passes by, we put away our decorations and get ready for the new month of gratitude. But now that Halloween is over, there is time to reflect: post-Halloween. 

Halloween was decently satisfactory, it was a fun night and -apart from stomach aches- went very well. The trick-or-treating was fun, but since this is a Bridges website article I will be focusing on the party at Bridges. Let's talk about the activities. There were an assortment of activities, all with different thoughts of mine about them. For one, there were the carnival games run by Mr. L, the games included bowling, tic tac toe, and eyeball pong. The games were pretty good but they were a bit hard for me personally. Another activity was the witch's hat ring toss. This activity was just a modified version of frisbee golf which I have no problem with whatsoever. Overall, Halloween was pretty great and I had a good time.



Domestication of Dogs 

By Tennyson


The domestication of dogs is a big topic that I'm working on in history upstairs. We've been working on it for a couple of weeks now and I've been making good progress. We get piled up into groups in history for the domestication of dogs. Right now my group is me, Hayes, and Nico. We've been doing great. We already have a slideshow. Domesticated dogs happened between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago. The first domesticated dog breed was the Saluki. Then they breed new dog breeds. 


The Library 

By Madelyn 



At Bridges we have a library and most libraries have books. It has lots of books for all the kids at Bridges to look through and read. We have a lot of Volunteers that help with keeping the library nice. The volunteer's job is to keep the library clean and nice. They also make sure any books that are ripped or hurt are fixed. Also, it's the volunteers’ job to get us books so we can read. There are also notes that the students at Bridges can take to write their opinions on the book. The library has multiple books and themes. Let's say if someone wants a history book, they go over to the bookshelf and get a history book. We are very lucky to have multiple volunteers that keep our library organized. The library system works like this: first of all, you pick a book, and you're allowed to have three books at the most out of the library. When you're done reading a book it goes in a bin in the library, that way we don't lose any books. All the classrooms have a mini library but the upstairs libraries are pretty good. When you are done with an independent reading book, you have to go up to the library and return the book. And then get a new book to read. In all, the library is a great and big part of Bridges Middle School. This is Madelyn, signing out.


          Fitness 

Fitness is something we work on in school. Some kids need it more than others. Some kids like it, some don't. One example is Last Fitness. We were doing laps and for 2 minutes a second later we explained why we couldn't do it longer. At this point, Mr. Demon replied. A second later he raised it to 2 minutes 40 seconds. A few seconds later, we were off! We were running like the wind. Around 30 seconds later, people set their pace. Taking off rounding the bend and then making another, we kept going and going and going. All I was thinking at the time was not to hit anybody and when the next corner was. The next quarter turn I kept the pace for most of the race until the end. I put on the Jets and took off down the track for another turn. I veered to the side through the turn cut past some people, and then started pulling ahead. The wind whistled through my hair. Rounding the bend again, I took off down the street side like Roadrunner without a coyote chasing me, however. The next quarter approached straight ahead. I started turning to the counter. And a second later, the time was called. Everybody slowed down into a walking pace, adding to the 2 minutes we added one minute of walking in circles. During that one minute, people chatted and talked about how they did. Almost exactly a minute later, Mr. Demon exclaims water break and everybody veers off in the table’s direction with their water bottles. Around a minute later, Mr Demon called everybody to line up on the line and proclaimed that we were going to play a game of plants and animals which I do like. The two Taggers were chosen, and they walked off their side preparing for the chaos that ensued. A countdown began. Three, two, one, go! As promised, chaos ensued! kids bolted left and right. The taggers stared each other down and took off trying to tag as many people as they attempted to get more than the other person. People went left and right trying to dodge them although over time I lost sight of them in the crowd. A second later a group of people came swarming behind me running I looked behind me and saw one tagger behind me I veered to my left and started running as fast as I could. Suddenly the other one appeared in front of me. I correct my course and turn right as the tagger takes off in Pursuit Of Me. Huffing and puffing the tagger slowly gained ground on me. I realized that if I didn't get away; I was going to get tagged. I used every bit of strength in me. To pull ahead I got away and molded back into the crowd. Every second fewer and fewer people were around me. I see another shot of people running up behind me. I know there's a tagger following them. I started pulling forward and saw one in front of me. He bolted at me and tagged me. I walked over to the side and prepared for what was next. As the numbers thinned finally two people remained. The game was called. Mr Demon counted up the sides and figured out my team had lost. Three members of my team started chanting plank plank plank plank including myself. Mr. Demon laughed, and a second later realized that we weren't kidding he walked over to the other team to decide Our Fate. Half of them had to do jumping jacks but Mr. Keenan split our team up into two groups one group doing planks and one group doing jumping jacks I chose planks. Kalman began Counting the counted down started one two three. as the seconds went by we eventually got to 50 nobody had dropped out yet. Suddenly a roar went up from the participants. we had all started counting simultaneously at the top of our lungs. 51, 52, 53, The count went on 70, 71, 72, About 6 seconds later it was called.  He acted strict during Fitness though one of his electives was called fitness boot camp. Although for once he proclaimed that you guys have done enough. We're not out here to hurt you. I can't let you go on forever. At which we all dropped to the ground we hopped up but a second later and walked over to grab water. It had been an amazing day and we were all grateful that Mr. Keenan allowed us to do planks instead of jumping jacks. Fitness ended that day then. Two lines formed and we walked inside to get ready to go home. Overall Fitness is very fun and we have a good time doing it so thank you, Mr. Keenan. 

by Sampson and Adam 



Halloween Math Mysteries

By Hudson 

On Halloween, Mr. Keenan’s math class did Halloween-themed Math Mysteries. We had two options for math mysteries, option A had multiplication, reading decimals, and equivalent fractions, with adding and subtracting fractions. Option B had finding unit rates, percent of a number, adding and subtracting decimals, greatest common denominator, and adding and subtracting fractions. Math Mysteries are where you do math problems to figure out clues about who committed some crime. In conclusion, Math Mysteries is an enjoyable challenge. Hudson signing off see ya next time.



DOUBLE-E DOUBLE FEATURE 

BY EWAN BARNETT

TICKET TO RIDE GERMANY

Hello once more, and get ready for the final edition of the “Ticket to Ride” website lineup!

 This time, I was in Germany, where I created DEUSIE ( Deutsche-Süd Internationale Eisenbahnen, or German South International Railways). The rules of the German version are the same as the original, only with a new feature:

 Meeples.

By now you might be rolling on the floor in hysteria, laughing out, “Meeples? Meeples???  What a silly name!” (If you are, please report to me, because that’s disrespectful to the meeples.) The meeples (no laughing!) are little tiny men that reside at every station. If you go from one station to another one adjacent to it, you can collect one meeple from one end of the corridor, and one meeple from another end of the corridor, which makes two meeples. (This is not a counting lesson!) But the thing that really makes meeples stand out is that they count as points. Each meeple you collect counts as one point and every point gets added to your final score. Sort of like a bonus.

 Enough about meeples, let’s get to the game!

DEUSIE was a success in the game. Again, I was pitted against Kalman. Kalman was a very fast route-completer, as he finished one of his routes by the time I was even halfway through my Hamburg-Frankfurt route. 1 1⁄4 Kalman routes later, I completed that first route, and then I took it easy- Frankfurt to Wurzburg.

 Meanwhile, Kalman was sprawling- from Frankfurt to Dusseldorf and back, numerous small cities, and even Innsbruck, Austria. In fact, he was so sprawling that I couldn’t take the fastest route from Frankfurt to Saarbrucken! So I ended up passing by another city to claim the route. Around that time, the game– and elective– ended.

 I can’t wait to see what elective I get next week!


A Very Happy Halloween

BOO! 

Did I scare you? No? Well, then you have a lot to learn. (Or maybe it’s just because the text doesn’t convey tone.) Anyway, as you all know, last 31st was HALLOWEEN!  Let me tell you about all the fun activities we did!

 The first activity was eyeball-on-a-spoon racing. The concept is just like, um, egg-on-a-spoon racing, only you replace the egg with a plastic eyeball.

 Number two was the putting-on-a-pumpkin-wrecking-ball-over-your-head-and-then-knocking-ov-er-”blood-bottles” game (or something like that). The idea is exactly what it sounds like.

 Number three was the HALLOWEEN CARNIVAL. There are three minigames in the Halloween carnival:

and

Finally, we did charades. You know that game… If you do not, go to my office for memory revival.

 Everybody had such great costumes, and there was (obviously)  lots of great candy!

 But the story doesn’t end after my mom picked me up. Pretty soon, we were trick-or-treating for HALLOWEEN!

 See you next week!


What Happens at Recess!

By Riley


Every day after lunch we have a recess that is 15 minutes long and is normally outside. Today I will talk about outside recess. I might talk about inside recess when it gets more rainy. In outside recess, the most popular game is tag. Freeze tag, elimination tag, and some other tags like normal tag, but rarely. The most popular tag is the freeze tag. In it, if you get tagged you become Frozen. If someone on your side tags you while you're Frozen, you are thawed so you can start running again. Freeze tag is home to some strange strategies. *cough* I'm talking about you, conga line. Anyway, there are some strategies like the charge, which is where everyone stands in a line and someone yells “Charge!” and then we all run straight at the tagger. Normally some of us pass right by them and untag everybody on the other side. Other strategies are pretending to be frozen, standing against a wall, and literally constantly saying, “I am a wall, there is no point in tagging me, I'm a solid inanimate object.” There's also the conga line which doesn't even really work. It's more of just a joke. Or the untag ring where you rapidly untag people in a ring, making you immortal. But your hands get so sore so normally it stops pretty fast. Taggers also do strategies such as saying, “Okay one of you sacrifice yourself and the rest of you can go free” and if somebody's forced to sacrifice themselves, let's just say they're not the sacrifice… the person who sacrificed them is the sacrifice! There are other games such as basketball and soccer. Or people just read or chat or arm wrestle... wait, what arm wrestling? When weird stuff happens during recess, it is always fun. Have fun at recess, thank you for reading.


Pumpkin Pendulum

By Tessa


        At school we played games for Halloween and we got candy and Pokemon cards. I'm going to tell you about one game that Mr. Keenan, my homeroom teacher, created. It is super fun and it is called the Pumpkin Pendulum. You put a small pumpkin, not those like slightly medium pumpkins, like those small white pumpkins you can get at Trader Joe's, which is a store I like to go to get pumpkins. You put one of those pumpkins inside some tights. At the bottom make sure it's where your toe should go and then put the open side on your head. Remember to take off any headbands or headgear you're wearing like glasses and prepare to swing and knock things over. We had cones and bottles of water with red dye in them. We swung our heads around and tried to knock over the bottles and the cones. It was super fun and after that I really needed a water break. He used black tights, and they were easy to see through and it was fun and luckily the tights were clean, new ones! It was really fun. The shorter ones did great at controlling them and the long ones were harder to do. Two seconds into playing the game for me I hit myself on the head with the pumpkin by swinging my head too hard! I was up against my friend Maddy. 

It's kind of scientific at the same time because of how hard you swing your head defines the force that you are going to be able to easily aim. The first couple minutes I was like a beast and just ran around trying to knock over cones. I lost but it was still a fun game and I had a really fun time. And we still got to trick or treat afterward. I was happy with the results and I went to my next game happily. Mr Keenan, my teacher, was happy about the results of the game that people liked. And I would like to say I loved the game. And he is a great homeroom teacher.

At the end of the day I got some cool Pokemon cards. I only had two of an Evolution series and Braylee had the third one that I needed to start the Evolution. I had the two last ones, I just needed that one so I traded one of my Pokemon cards for that card. Each pack comes with four cards and I traded two cards for a Pikachu and something else. 

That's all the time I have for writing today. I would like to write about more cool stuff next week and I hope to hear you enjoy what I write. That's Tessa signing off from Flamingo South.


I.E.W.

By Freddie the Developing Writer


What do you call a cow with no legs?

 Read to the end to find out.


Writing an I.E.W. is kind of like an essay on a specific topic. We are learning how to basically take our writing and make it our own without getting copyright violations. We the students are given an article and for every sentence, we are to highlight no more than three words from the sentence. Then we pull up Google Docs and write our own article on the same topic as the article given by the teacher using the information found in the article. If your article shares too many similarities to the article you started with, then it won't be accepted, forcing the students to be creative with their wording. Overall, we aren't expected to get out an I.E.W. that fast but I've been warned that we will soon be expected to pump out an article once a week. This may cause stress among the students. In general, writing is a fun and hands-on activity that lots of students enjoy including myself. Bye bye.


Writers Notes

Hi everyone I hope you are doing well at the time of my writing this I have a small belly ache because it’s the day after Halloween. I'm honored to see you all here today or tonight or when and wherever you are right now, so thank you. And now the punch line to that joke that is at the top.


You call a cow with no legs: ground beef.


Written by Freddie.

Hopefully edited by Mr. Keenan (Editor’s note: it was!)



What We Did on Halloween By Rowan M.


So we did our normal classes reading, then math, and then Writing like normal. I believe a few people did their scary stories or haunted houses at Writing. Then we had lunch and recess. After recess, we did the Halloween games for the next 3 hours or two and a half. They split us into groups, the skeletons, the ghosts, and the bats I think those were all the groups. They made leaders for each group and gave them a sheet of paper saying which game we were going to next. So the games that we did were Halloween-themed charades. There was another game where we took a stocking from a bin and put a pumpkin in it, put it on our head, and tried to knock down these fake blood bottles and cones. There were also two teams. I don't think the teacher's intention to make it like this but it was kind of a competition to us. (Editor’s note: it was indeed a competition!) Another one was where we went into this room with 3 mini-games and each game had four people. Tic tac toe but with bean bags so it was a lot harder, and the third one was where we took these little tiny plastic balls and bounced them on the table to try to get them into these cups. We each had three tries to get it in. Two people on each side and they switched. Bowling was like that but with two tries and the last person that tried to knock them out was the person that helped with the pins. The chair was comfy so I kind of liked doing it. There is disc golf too but with numbers on the witches’ hats because it's Halloween and yeah. Then there was a game where we took these spoons and put this plastic eyeball on them and raced around the room. First to get the square, three people each match. Then we got candy at the end of the day.