It's the Law!

Study the legal system and how it works.  Discover the courtroom, identify the steps of a trial, and visit the Michigan Hall of Justice.  Students will learn important skills in interviewing clients, creating factual timelines, and establishing the theory of a case, and the art of negotiation.  Through hands-on lessons, students will analyze cases, think critically, and build strong leadership and teamwork skills.  

Game Crafting 

Pioneered and popularized by games like Final Fantasy, Stardew Valley, and Pokémon, students will create their own game in Scratch. Basic templates will be provided to showcase core features like sprite movement, map scrolling, dialogue & environmental interaction, and more!

Problem Solver's Playbook: Cracking Math Challenges with Creativity

In this class, students will explore four creative strategies that make math problems easier to tackle. These methods all share one goal: simplifying the problem! By learning and practicing these strategies, students will grow into confident problem solvers, ready for challenges in their future math studies.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Find a Pattern: Math is full of patterns! We’ll explore how spotting them can unlock the solution to many problems. Great problem solvers love to experiment and play with ideas until patterns emerge.

• Make a List: Just like Santa, we’ll use lists to get organized and break down complex problems into manageable steps. Lists can reveal solutions that aren’t obvious at first glance!

• Draw a Picture: Sometimes, the easiest way to understand a problem is to see it. Drawing can simplify problems, especially in geometry or situations where visuals reveal hidden connections.

• Work Backwards: When the end is clear, but the path is tricky, we can reverse the steps! We’ll practice working backward from the solution to figure out how to get there.

Blackout Poetry

Blackout poetry is a form of poetry (sometimes called “found poetry” or “redacted poetry”) in which a writer takes an existing page of text—such as a newspaper, a page from a book, a pamphlet, a page in a magazine—and creates something new by “blacking out” all text but a select few words (usually no more than 20) that create a poem. The rest of the text can be “blacked out” by either completely covering them or doodling to the point where all other words are recognizable. As a genre, blackout poetry combines unique visual elements, such as the space between words and doodles, in addition to the creation of verbal poetry.

Blackout poetry is a fun, creative way to teach students literary devices like diction, tone, word choice, imagery, and mood. It’s also a great way to introduce students to creative writing, poetry, and literature in a way that promotes self-expression, reading comprehension, and collaboration. This class will familiarize students to blackout poetry as a genre and art form and give them the opportunities to create their own poetry, explore the relationship between text and visuals, learn to give feedback, and share their work.

Monday - Become familiar with blackout poetry as a genre and art form.
Tuesday - Create blackout poems.
Wednesday - Create artistic renditions to accompany poetry.
Thursday - Learn how to revise, edit, and title poems. Share work and give feedback.
Friday - Review a completed packet of poems, reflect on the experience.