CCSD news: Boys basketball players honored

CHURCHILL COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT 

All 13 players on the CCHS varsity basketball team received a 3.5 grade point average or higher for the fall 2023 semester.

“I am incredibly proud of my team. It is really something that every single one of them is not only dedicating themselves to their athletics but also their academics,” coach Chelle Dalager said. “I just love to see their commitment on and off the court.”

CHURCHILL COUNTY MIDDLE SCHOOL

Students in Zoey Brown’s math classes played the human pretzel game to strategize and bond as a class.

During the pretzel game, students must untangle the knot they are in, without letting go of each other's hands. Students start in a circle and have to grab different hands, and cannot grab the hand of someone right next to them. As the knot becomes untangled, a circle will start to form.

“As the first semester comes to an end, most of the students, I feel, are experiencing burnout and start having negative feelings about school, peers, and teachers,” Brown said.

When the students came back from the break to start a new semester, Brown thought this would be a fun activity to get them moving, thinking, and maybe even renew some relationships after the break.

“This game helped the students communicate and strategize with each other, as well as have a bit of fun before we just jumped right back into learning,” Brown said.

One challenge the students faced and quickly overcame was effectively communicating with their group.

“Some just wanted to do whatever came to mind without communicating to others their ideas. However, we did this multiple times and they got better,” Brown said. Another challenge was that students tried to do it as fast as they could to beat the other groups, which led to some groups letting go of their hands and having to start over. “It was not about who could do it the fastest. It was about who would communicate and actually take the time to analyze and talk through it. Kind of like when it comes to math,” Brown said. The students figured out that they needed to effectively communicate their ideas and strategies with one another to get less tangled.

NUMA 

Students in Janine Mello’s fourth-grade class studied energy in science. The learning target was for students to explore the relationship between the speed of an object and the energy of that object. Students were asked to design a ramp to make a toy car go as fast as possible.

“The purpose of this lab was for students to explore through inquiry, the relationship between potential and kinetic energy,” Mello said.

The students recorded their discoveries in their science journals and concluded that raising the ramp higher gave the car more energy.

“It was so great to see them really problem solve and come to the conclusion of needing to raise the ramp. I am so proud of them. Nice work, young engineers,” she said.

E.C. BEST 

Students in Melissa Humphrey’s class learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’s Big Words to expand what they have learned about of main ideas and details. They also tied this into their social studies unit as they learned about civil rights.

“As a class, we brainstormed our dreams by writing them on a sticky note, and then we made an ‘I Have a Dream’ project that we displayed in the hallway. It was really the perfect way to tie all of our units together while also teaching the value and the impatience of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s work,” Humphrey said.

LAHONTAN

Stacey Manning’s class learned about the winter season.

“I read lots of fiction and non-fiction stories about winter to them then we brainstormed fun activities that we could do in the winter and what we need to do to protect ourselves during the winter,” Manning said.

The students wrote a realistic fiction story about a fun winter day and what they like to do during this season. “We have been working on using sequencing words in our writing such as first, then, next, and last, so they had to include those in the stories they wrote,” Manning said.

Students then completed their unit about winter by making a snow globe scene to illustrate the story they wrote.

NORTHSIDE EARLY LEARNING CENTER 

Students in Laura Lee Christensen’s class are learning about arctic animals.

“I am also having them practice their fine motor skills, and experiment with water, salt, and a hammer to save the frozen arctic animals they are learning about,” Christensen said.