Cooking & Chemistry Quest, Restaurant Reviews, Civ Debates & Spirit Week (Session 2, Week 1)

Welcome to the Session 2, Week 1 Launchpad Newsletter!

This session is going to be a very exciting one, as we have started our first science Quest of the year: Cooking and Chemistry. We are all enrolled in a Harvard EdX Chemistry Course, which, if we successfully complete, will result in us earning a graduation certificate! 

This week, we learned about dimensional analysis, balancing equations, and more (for those of you who like chemistry, try to balance this equation: 𝐻2+𝑂2→𝐻2𝑂). To end the week, we took part in a hands-on experiment in which we made our own cola! 

For Genre, we began working on our restaurant reviews! This Session, we will be visiting a restaurant of our choice, and writing a review based on our experience. Along the way, we need to choose a reviewer persona, and create a video sharing our review. This week we spent time researching reviews, and sent an email to our parents asking for their participation in this Genre (most of you should have gotten one). 

We also took part in a very informative Civ. One of the most interesting debates we had this week was centered on the Bill of Rights. To prepare, we researched the first Ten Amendments, and answered questions such as, ‘What do you believe to be the most important Amendment?’ or ‘If you had to abolish three of the first Ten Amendments, what would they be?’. This last question sparked a very interesting discussion, which left us with a lot of questions to consider.  

Finally, we had Spirit Week! Monday was Pajama Day, and many learners came in with very comfortable outfits, some even going so far as to bring pillows and blankets. Tuesday was Decades Day. While there were outfits from many decades, the majority of Falcons dressed as hippies from the 70s. Wednesday was Animal Day, which meant a lot of fluffy onesies and cat ears, and Thursday was Color Day, where each studio dressed in their assigned color (Launchpad was red, Journey was blue, Discovery was green, and the Sparks were purple).

And on Friday, we celebrated our annual Halloween party! I am very excited to see all of the costumes the learners will bring in. 

Overall, this was a fun first week, full of learning and excitement. Thanks for reading!

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