Welcome to the first week of the second session in the Journey studio!  We’re kicking things off with a brand-new quest: Biology...

New Session! - With the session break ending Session 2 has officially started! and even though only 1 week passed in session 2 we already...

Session 2 has begun with a burst of energy, creativity, and teamwork!  Monday set the tone for the week as the Sparks dove into Art...

Welcome to the last week of the first session’s Launchpad newsletter! Since this is the last week of the session, we spent a lot of time making sure our Genre challenges were well-edited and our Quest was thoroughly reflected on. In Genre, we made some last edits to our blog posts to ensure they were ready for greenlighting (the final approval stage). It took a lot of hard work and effort to make sure our blog posts met the excellence standards, but after a few hours, we acco

This week started off with the much-awaited field trip to Manhattan! Being the first Journey Field trip of the 2024-25 school year, it was a very fun and exciting experience. Journey had begun the trip on Monday morning, getting off of the bus and into the Museum of Illusions location, where they’d had a great time and took lots of interesting and mind-bending photos. Following that, Journey walked to Chelsea Market, an indoor recreation of a busy urban street market, with mo

Exhibition ! - Last week: Discovery Elected 6 Exhibition hosts 3 from north and 3 from south. From South, the Exhibition hosts are Seva, Emmy, and Niko. The Exhibition hosts from North are Auggie, Kalina, and Alon, And on Thursday When we had the exhibition the learners got to sign the contract and do other fun things together at the First 2024-2025 Session Exhibition. Door Stuck! - Somebody locked the door and closed it with Lukas's computer stuck inside the big room bathroo

Hello Sparks Tribe Families, We’ve wrapped up the final week of Session One, and what an exciting time it’s been!  The week kicked off with a truly inspiring Muscle Monday, where we learned about Stephen Wiltshire, an incredible autistic savant known for drawing entire cityscapes from memory. After watching a video about him, the Sparks took on a challenge—recreating the New York City skyline! They had just three minutes to observe the picture, and then had to finish their dr

Welcome to the sixth week of the first session’s Launchpad newsletter! This week in Genre, we put the finishing touches on our blog posts by giving each other a final critique. We have written four blog posts each, some of which will be published on an official Acton Academy blog that will be accessible to all parents and family members.  In Quest this week, we played our A Game again, except instead of playing as individuals, we split into groups to learn the crucial skill o

This is it! We’ve completed all the Civ and Quest challenges for this session! All that’s left is the finalization of Genre work and the compilation of badges. Besides that excitement, this week was definitely very interesting.  Much like in previous weeks, Learners led a few of the Morning and afternoon Socratic Discussions. Two notable topics for these discussions were “Voting systems in principle democracy” and “Gaming and the success of Minecraft .” The learners leading t

Exhibition Hosts! - On Monday Discovery Elected 6 Exhibition hosts 3 from north and 3 from south. From South, the Exhibition hosts are Seva, Emmy, and Niko. The Exhibition hosts from North are Auggie, Kalina, and Alon False Alarm! - On Tuesday Somebody in Journey Was heating up a cookie when it started smoking and triggered a fire alarm. It got so serious that the firefighters came. But when the firefighters checked everything it turned out that there was no fire and it was s

Hello Spark Tribe Families! We had an exciting and eventful week! On Muscle Monday, our Sparks dove into an interesting experiment involving exercise and nutrition. We split into two groups—one that had breakfast and one that skipped breakfast—before tackling a series of physical challenges. It was fascinating to see how each group performed! The results surprised us all, as the winners weren't what we initially expected. This experiment sparked great conversations about the

Welcome to the fifth week of the first session’s Launchpad Newsletter! This week in Genre, we wrote yet another post for our NGA blog. We focused on the Hero’s Journey and the various steps the Hero’s Journey consists of, such as the Call to Adventure and Meeting the Mentor, to name a few. We spent a lot of time freewriting, where we sat quietly with ourselves, allowing our inner thoughts to come to writing.  We started out NGA this week with Clearness Committee meetings. The

Discovery Salad! At the beginning of the session, every discovery learner planted a plant in the lettuce grow system (Lettuce and other plants). And on Wednesday the learners harvested the plants in a way that would let them regrow and put them together with store bought ingredients (Croutons, Seasonings, Cherry tomatoes, Carrots, and cucumbers). To create A great salad! To Harvest, wash, and cut ingredients that either we grew or bought from the grocery store. Most learners

Hello Spark Tribe Families! As our 5th week together comes to an end, it's been another exciting one full of learning, fun, and connection! On Muscle Monday, Sparks engaged their senses by using their noses to smell a variety of "mystery" spices. The room was filled with curiosity and laughter as everyone shared what memories the different scents triggered. It was amazing to hear the unique and special connections Sparks made to certain smells. For Team Building Tuesday, our

Welcome to the fourth week of the first session’s Launchpad newsletter! This week in Genre, we again focused on writing our NGA blog posts. We styled our pieces after Seth Godin , an author known for his short but very informative blog posts. Our goal was to pick a topic we were interested in and write about it in under 200 words. This proved challenging to some, but in the end, we all created posts we felt proud of.  In Quest, we continued playing our A Game (the card games

Before sharing this week’s highlights, those from Friday of last week are just as interesting:  All four studios arrived not at their usual building that morning but at a campground. This was for the first “Alpine day” of the 2024-25 year! Throughout this day, Journey learners went on a hike, played lots of games, and met up for some organized activities with their “House.” In the afternoon, Journey met with a survival instructor named Zach, who showed and challenged us to bu

Lip Dub Results! - On Monday the results for the lip Dub came out and AABC did great! Our Journey and Sparks studios went on to the Globals and the Discovery studio sadly did not make it to the Globals but, got an impressive 3rd place while Kings Academy moved on to the Global Competition for the second time in a row! 1st WW of the school year finished! - With Friday being the last day to work on our Hero boards the First Writer’s workshop project of the year and session is d

Dear Sparks Tribe Parents, We’ve just wrapped up another exciting week! Here’s a quick recap of what our incredible tribe experienced: Muscle Monday  was all about exploring the wonders of our bodies. Sparks dove into the fascinating world of the skeletal and muscular systems, discovering how our bones and muscles work together to help us move. On Team Building Tuesday , we hosted an energetic Spelling-Bee challenge! Our Sparks were split into groups and had to collaborate to

Welcome to the third week of the first session’s Launchpad newsletter!! This week was the start of an exciting adventure in the Launchpad studio as we began our Next Great Adventure searches! The Next Great Adventure (or NGA, for short) allows young people to explore and discover their passions, find their gifts and calling, and use them to change the world one day. This week, we spent a lot of time studying and finding industries that interest us, and we took a deep dive int

The third week of the 2024-25 school year introduced many aspects of the regular year’s schedule, allowing new (and returning) Journey learners to adjust and get used to how the week flows.  One of the important topics introduced this week was “Deep Books.” Returning learners were already familiar with the topic from years prior, and detailed guidelines allowed new learners to begin pitching (sharing with the studio details about a book and why they believe it’ll help them on