The Raven's Call

The second quarter of this school year has been as busy and exciting as the first! We can’t believe the year is already halfway over and we’re moving into the second semester. Our office has grown exponentially in size and we’ve accommodated everyone by adding another new teacher to our teaching staff. Jan has been a great addition and we love having her on our team!

We celebrated Halloween with a great party where families enjoyed carnival games, a pumpkin carving contest, a mystery table activity and a costume contest. Staff members dressed as Care Bears and had a lovely time celebrating with everyone. Families were able to enjoy trick-or-treating with our neighbors before they left for the day.

We have several more holiday activities planned before the holidays. We’re really excited to join the Eagle River office for a holiday party at Bear Tooth Theater to watch The Grinch and eat pizza! We’re also wrapping the season up with an incredible field trip to The Christmas Factory at the state fairgrounds.

Our weekly and monthly clubs are still going strong! Several clubs are continuing into the second half of the year and we’re introducing some new ones! Please click here to view our schedule of workshops beginning in January. We hope to see more and more families in our office for our fun activities after the winter break!

MAP Testing:

Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) is an optional assessment tool available to our Raven families through our school district. This year, we are offering it remotely, so parents would be the on-site proctor at home and Maegan will administer the "teacher" side from the office. We will be offering both morning and afternoon testing sessions during the two-week testing window. Click here to sign up for testing!

Drama Club:

Second quarter proved to be as fun and busy as the first. We started off the quarter with a huge Halloween party. Everyone had a great time carving pumpkins, playing games, and participating in a costume contest. We also announced the winners of our raffle drawing and everyone received a goodie bag on the way out.

We had such a great turnout for a field trip to Pizza Man that we had to add a second session! Kids got to tour the restaurant kitchen, make and bake their own individual pizzas, and then they all ate together in the dining room.

Mom’s Night Out was a ton of fun! Parents and staff got together to have dinner and there was no shortage of excellent conversation and laughs. It was a nice chance for everyone to get to know each other a little better.

This was the first year that we joined the Anchorage office in making placemats for Bean’s Cafe’s annual Thanksgiving feast. We had a work station set up in the office for a couple hours where kids could come in to create a placemat for donation. Families also had the option to make them at home and drop them off.

Our Career Connections series continued with a visit from the owners and operators of El Senor Moose. The kids learned about the day-to-day tasks involved in operating a food truck. Afterward, the kids got to tour the truck one-by-one and then we all got to order the delicious food to enjoy.

We had a special session of our Culinary Cook Off in December. We embraced the season with the theme of Christmas cookies. Everyone brought scrumptious cookies to sample, including iced sugar cookies, snowballs, domino cookies, and white chocolate/peppermint. In the end, people voted Tyree’s chocolate-dipped cookie pops their favorite.

The rest of December will see two more special events. First, we are hosting a Mom’s Day Out where kids will join us for crafts and a movie while their parents get a couple of hours to themselves for shopping, wrapping gifts, or just some quiet time. Second, we are joining forces with the Anchorage office for our annual holiday party. We will be watching a movie and having a pizza buffet at Bear Tooth in Anchorage. It has always been a hit in the past, and we’re certain this year will be just as much fun!

The Fairbanks Office has been busy, filled with many activities for families!

The Halloween Party was a blast! We had games run by the teachers, a photo booth provided by the Yearbook Club, and a spaghetti dinner available. Many families dressed up in costumes and started their Halloween weekend.

Craft nights run by Celeste have been available for families to come in and have craft time with their students and other families. We have made all sorts of crafts, from turkey bags to Christmas ornaments.

Joe Griek and Jennifer Martin took part in a field trip to the Civil Air Patrol Hanger here in Fairbanks. Students and families learned about the Civil Air Patrol and did many activities.

The Fairbanks well-known Ice Dogs Hockey Team came in twice and read to some students. They read some classic Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street books to the kids. Like any team event, there was signing and pictures with the students.

We hosted a Christmas movie night, something new for our office but familiar to the others. We watched the classic story How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the office media room. We made popcorn for the family as they sprawled out on the floor in their blankets and pillows.

The Yearbook Club has been taking off. The group ran a photo booth during the Halloween party and will be running another one at the Christmas party with the addition of the photos turning into ornaments! The Yearbook is still in the works, but the sooner the family buys their book, the better!

Coming up is our Christmas Party! On the 15th, we will be hosting here at the office a bazaar, food, games, and prizes for the families to come in and celebrate.

Our second quarter of the year has continued to fly by with many fun activities and events. In November, we welcomed a new member to our team when former Raven graduate Jessica got hired as our clerk. Check out our fun updated staff photo! Be sure to keep an eye on weekly newsletters, Instagram, and our Facebook Group so you don’t miss out on any of the excitement.

Competitions

Our Lego League team, “The One and Only 49ers,” practiced hard and prepared faithfully for the tournament, finishing in the top four so they will get to go to the state competition. Our Battle of the Books teams have gotten a good start to practicing together for the competition in February. We had four disguised turkeys this year and five of our doors are very festively decorated for this year’s contest.

Clubs

Adventures in Bookland Book Club read Green Ember in October and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in November. They had a lot of fun meeting both months for lunch, thematic activities, and crafts. For our monthly Lego Club meetings, we are doing different theme challenges and then displaying the creations for the month until the next meeting. In Oct, we built planes or other flying machines, and in Nov, we built amusement park rides and activities. Math Club has had a small but faithful group this year, and so far they have done fun activities involving dice games to practice math facts, hands-on Algebra, treasure hunting with graphs, and math in art. They would love to have more middle school students join them in the spring. Pokemon Club continues to meet twice a month and they have a great time comparing cards, trading, and playing together. Chess Club has a good-sized group that comes weekly to learn new chess moves and hone their skills.

Field Trips

Officer Cryderman led us on another wonderful tour of the police station where we got to learn about many of the tools and equipment used in their job, and the kids got to see how evidence is processed, sit in the back of a squad car, and visit the temporary holding cells. We also got to go on a field trip to the Valley Fire Station, and many families commented that this was one of the best since the firefighters were so personable and good with the kids and they made it very interesting and interactive.

Marvelous Mondays/Science Fridays

Marvelous Mondays have continued to have a good turnout each week. We had fun playing group games in October, crafting Christmas gifts in November, and making paper gingerbread houses in Dec while eating tasty gingerbread men cookies. Science Fridays have been a big hit this year with alternating science experiments and origami models. In November, the kids made origami models of arctic ecosystems and enjoyed the messy fun of mixing up oobleck and discovering how it is a non-newtonian fluid. In December, the whole office smelled clean and fresh when the kids experimented with elephant toothpaste and got to play with the foamy product.

Other Recurring activities

The Girls’ Gathering continues to have a lot of fun meeting every other week to do activities together. They have taken a field trip to The Fudge Co, done fall crafts, participated in our door decorating contest, and made Christmas crafts in addition to other fun happenings. Lunch Bunch has been a great time each month to enjoy good books together with fun audio enhancements as well as allowing kids the opportunity to share things with each other during the Show & Tell part and creating funny Mad Libs as a group. The students in our National Honor Society continue to meet monthly and in November, they did a service project to assemble Thanksgiving baskets to distribute to those in need. We are excited to welcome eight new members to our Juneau chapter of NHS this year which will bring our total up to seventeen. Poetry Tea Time has had a small turnout so far, but they have had a good time eating treats, drinking tea, sharing favorite poetry, and writing some of their own. We are very thankful for all the parents who attend our monthly PAC meetings and contribute to our planning and preparation for events. Parent participation makes such a difference and we like to reward it in a small way through participation badges and door prizes. Join us!

One-time events

One of our big events of the quarter was getting a week-long visit from Ryan. He was able to meet individually with 20 high school students in addition to participating in our Senior Meeting and taking a tour of the UAS Campus. Our Halloween costume and craft party was a huge event with food, crafts, games, and a fun costume contest parade. We also had an epic stocking stuffer gift exchange with 32 kids participating this year.

The Wasilla office is extremely proud of our University of Alaska Scholars!

Congratulations to the following students:

Ruthie Mitchell

Liliana Koppenberg

Elijah Rasmussen

Ben Wolf

Benjamin Palmer

We know that you will do great things!

The Wasilla Raven office has continued to be busy with workshops, activities, and field trips for students and parents to participate in. Our book club has been reading books involving animals. The students arrive excited to share what they thought of the current month’s book and their discussions have gotten increasingly more detailed as they learn how to share. The chess club is a determined group, learning strategy, which currently meets once a month. They will start meeting bi-monthly in January. The D&D club is a student favorite playing out their scenarios, meeting weekly, and in the new year, they will also be meeting bi-monthly. The bowling club is nice for families since the youngest to the oldest can participate. Students enjoy learning new games and playing favorites at Games Club, which is open to 3rd grade and up.

The Culinary Cook Off activity allows students to share their culinary skills. So far students have showcased cookies, soup, chili, and pie. December’s bake off is cakes (no boxed mixes).

For students who like to express their creativity and learn more about art, we offer two different types of workshops. Students of all ages learn about famous artists and their work, as well as various art techniques when they come to the ARTiculate workshops taught by our fabulous family liaison. Daphne also facilitates the Crafternoon workshops, which are wildly popular.

The “Disguise Tom Turkey” contest went over well, and families can now enter the “Gingerbread House” contest, where Mr. and Mrs. Gingerbread are looking for new real estate!