Back for another year of adventures…
ESCAPE Club Family,
We’re indeed back at it for year #19 of the ESCAPE Club at DeJean. Kids are coming to meetings, and we’ve already been on our first trip. (The trip summary email is coming soon! We’re of course a little behind already.) We’ve got nine trips planned again, and several dates are already on the calendar. This year’s shirt design is coming along (still in draft form shown above–don’t make any final judgments!). So as you can see, we’ve got a nice group of kids, and things are really moving.
Neither Jason nor John is working on site at DeJean this year, so that will create its own set of challenges. But we’ve got another great team of teachers to support us, chaperone trips, and take care of details while we’re away from campus.
We’re still meeting weekly after school to prep for trips, learn a little ecology, history, and geography, and hang out together. The foos ball table is rocking, as usual, and Connect Four and ping pong are making their appearances. The principal, Mr. McGee even stops in once in a while to take a break from his busy day!
Another challenge has been trying to up our game a little in our lesson planning at weekly meetings, in particular to try and support new NGSS standards. Kids are creating their own models to represent data, designing solutions to problems, and doing more thinking in our lessons than in recent years. That’s been a difficult, but fun challenge to work on as the year has begun. Some examples are below. Students were asked to represent the percentage of plastic water bottles that actually get recycled, vs. those that go to landfills.
We’re looking forward to another great year, and we’re glad to have you all along again. If you’d like to chaperone any of the trips, please let us know. If you’d like to visit us on a Thursday afternoon, we’d be glad to have you. And if you’d like to support us financially, we always appreciate it. All the usual channels for donation are open, but let us know if you need more information.
We’ll be in touch soon with summaries from our first trips!