Fallingbrook Flyer
IELC 68D Class Newsletter, December 2015 - Issue #2
Message from the Editors
Thank-you for taking the time to read our class newsletter.
These past weeks have been very eventful.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and Happy Kwanza!
Sincerely,
Students of 68D, Mrs. Aiello & Mr. Windover
Editors this issue: Javeria and Cynthia
A Day in the Life of Our Principal
What is it like being a principal? That is the question we wanted to answer for this month’s newsletter. We interviewed Mrs. Jackowski in her office about her daily events. We were surprised by the answers we came up with. It turns out that she doesn’t have a fixed schedule she has to follow every day. She prioritizes the tasks she needs to complete each day and does them according to Mr. Hussain and other teachers’ schedules, depending on the tasks. Mrs. Jackowski loves being the principal of Fallingbrook because of the wonderful staff and students. Sometimes Mrs. Jackowski cannot do everything she wants to do with staff and students because the budget does not allow us to fund these events and trips. Now we know the gist of what it is like being a principal.
Written by: Linda & Bhargavi
Our In-School FLL Tournament
Written by: Jacob
Oakville FLL Tournament
On December 5, three teams from Fallingbrook participated in the annual FLL challenge. FLL (First Lego League) is a competition where over 20,000 teams from 80 countries program a robot to complete certain missions on a mat. Every year, a new topic is chosen, and the mat is changed. The missions on the mat correspond to the topic. This year’s topic is Trash Trek. In addition to the robot run, there is also a project involved. Teams are required to choose a problem related to the topic, and solve it. Seven teams were then chosen to represent the region.
One team from Fallingbrook, team Forty-Two, won the project research award. Unfortunately, no Fallingbrook teams passed on to the next round. In the robot missions, the Grade 6 IELC team scored 255 points, and the Grade 7&8 IELC team scored 205 points. The mainstream team’s score was 220. Nice job, teams!
Written by: Nikhil
Secret Santa
Written by: Michael and Vaibhav
Winter Concert
Written by: Rishi
Animal Puns
The animals are taking a test,
The lion say to the cheetah,
“Don’t be such a cheetah”
The cheetah say to the lion,
“Stop lion.”
The deer then says,
“Oh deer.”
The caribou says,
“I can’t caribout this.”
The bee says,
“Can you guys, bee quiet?”
The elephant says,
“That is very irrelephant.”
The bear says,
“I can’t bear this anymore.”
The horse says,
“Aren’t your voices getting horse?”
The fish says,
“You guys aren’t being very effishient.”
The owl says,
“Owl give anything for you guys to shut up.”
The cat says,
“This is a catastrophe!”
The kitten says,
“No kitten!”
The toucan says,
“Only toucan pass the test.”
The koala says,
“I think I will koalafy.”
The turtle says,
“This test is turtley awesome!”
30 seconds later…
The hawk says,
“What a hawkward silence!”
The seal says,
“Just seal your mouths shut!”
The hippo yells,
“What a hippocrite!”
The earwig says,
“Earwigo again.”
The giraffe says,
“You guys are giraffeing me crazy!”
The toad teacher finally walks into the room…
“Sorry i’m late but my car got toad.”
The panda says,
“I am telling you, it was complete pandamonium.”Written by: Ben and Saad
Climate Change
Over the course of about 2 weeks, classes 68C and 68D learned a lot climate change and the scale of it. Before these lessons, many of us did realize the scale of the problem, but they could not feel any guilt or any other feeling from just looking at statistics. In this time, we came to realize just how bad the problem was.
Just like last year, we watched a documentary, the Inconvenient Truth. The Inconvenient Truth was about a documentary about a speech by Al Gore, the vice president under Bill Clinton from 1993-2001. The information about global warming was gathered mostly from the speech and many statistics and graphs. However, there was not anything to show about how big of a problem in real life climate change was.
This year, everybody was shown a completely different but interesting documentary about global warming. The documentary was called Chasing Ice, created by self-taught photographer James Balog. The documentary was about how James Balog was very disappointed in the world because everybody kept denying global warming. So, he decided to create the Extreme Ice Survey, or the EIS, to photograph and document the melting of glaciers to show the world how fast climate change was really coming.
Back then, many people kept denying climate change, but after the photography of James Balog, there was no point in denying it anymore. In the EIS, cameras were put all over Greenland, Arctic Canada, Iceland, and many other places to photograph over amounts of time to create stopmotion videos of the glaciers melting. It was a huge success. From one of the cameras, it captured the a 1.9 mile retreat of a glacier as it melted away in only 3 years.
After watching this documentary, the students of 68C and 68D had completely different thoughts on the scale of global warming. Fortunately, the world is realizing that something needs to be done. Just recently, many new rules have been developed to stop climate change. The world will be aiming to cap the temperature rise at at least only 1.5 degrees celsius, and we will be working to completely replace cars that release CO2 by the year 2030!
In conclusion, climate change is a difficult problem to solve, but it will be stopped. If people stop their usual habits, then it will happen. Still, it will be difficult to replace everything because many people are just doing it for the sake of money. More people need to understand that they need to forget about money and help the environment first.
Written by: Alex Ma
Food Drive and Charity Activities
From December 7 to 11, the food drive happened. The food drive is done annually, and it is for donating food to the food drive for poor hungry families so they can get food for free there. During that week, a lot of food and money were donated for the food drive. There were 3 special days within the food drive week; Macaroni Monday, Tuna Tuesday, and Fruity Friday. There was a point system in the school for donating canned food. The class that donated the most earned a pizza party and many other things. For the special days, like Macaroni Monday, any kind of grain category food donated would earn double points. Same for Tuesday, which was meat, and Friday, which was fruits and veggies.
And guess who won all 3 days… 68C! They bought the most amount of food in the whole school, which was about 365 in total food packages that week. That was amazing! That would be plenty of food for the food drive and hungry families. However, that was not the only charity event. 2 Other events took place that week, which raise the money even further. The two events were a student vs. teacher dodgeball game and an activity afternoon event.
The dodgeball game was to raise money for the food banks, and students could pay to play or watch the game. Even though the event was supposed to be a friendly game and a kind donation, Many teachers took the game too seriously and made many statements like people should prepare some tissue boxes so they could cry when the students lost. Talk about manners! Among these mean teachers, Ms. Cliche was the boss.
In the other event, which was much more fun than the dodgeball game, students could pay two dollars to participate in a dance, or join a BYOD room, play in the computer lab, stay in the study hall, and etc. Students usually find this very interesting because they get to play the entire afternoon, so many people paid. All this money also went to the food banks. The cool thing about the dance was that the students got to choose their own songs to play on the speakers.
In conclusion, a lot was done for the food banks and the poor families that need food to feed.
Written by: Alex Ma
Book Fair
This year’s book fair was a complete success. Our initial goal was $3,000 and we raised $3,900!!! This project allowed our library to restock on new and improved books.
Reviews
The book fair was full of amazing books that were not very well priced but the money was going to the school and the books were still really good nonetheless. So I rate 3.5/5 - Cailan 68D
Survey
Students
Rating
Michael
3.5
Cynthia
3.5
Javeria
3.5
Bhargavi
3.5
“Survey says” that people think It was ok but could be better.
Written by: Cailan
Dance Activities
For the past few weeks, students from Rick Hansen Secondary School have been coming over to Fallingbrook Middle School to teach the students of 68D and 68C some dances that they have choreographed. These students have been coming over multiple times a week to teach during the classes’ dance classes. The students have been teaching the classes dances for many different songs including songs such as “Hotline Bling” by Drake. During the past week the students of 68C and 68D were given an assignment, the assignment was to choreograph their own dance for a song. The enthusiasm for these dance classes vary from student to student, but I think that overall most of the students enjoy these dance classes.
Written by: William
Video Game Review - Star Wars Battlefront
Star Wars Battlefront, by DICE, a division of EA *shudder* is one of the most anticipated releases of the year. It, at least among critics, the ones being payed to give good reviews, has been critically acclaimed to some degree. However, user reviews have been quite negative. In this review, I will be going over pros and cons, with kudos to twitch tv.
First, as is too common, the pros. The two, no three, big things this game has going for it, are first, the graphics. Although there are flaws in this, overall it looks frighteningly like the movies, and is absolutely stunning. The second is sound. It also, while having again, smaller flaws in it, is a wonderfully sounding game overall. It may as well be a virtual reality. Literally. The other thing, the biggest thing it has going for it are the fanboys. If it were a new release, it would be regarded as a mediocre shooter that fails DICE, who also made the critically acclaimed series Battlefield. However, with the game being Star Wars themed, and the greatness that came before it, it is much more successful than it would have been. However, most people say, and I would agree, it would be better to get over the graphics, and pick up the better Battlefront 2, for $10 on Steam.
Second, by process of elimination apparently, the cons. Well…. I guess, first is the price. $60 for a skeleton of a game, and 40 more for a DLC which is about 1/10th of the game, which isn’t saying much. Second, this game has an absolutely wretched single player. It is a shame to all the better Battlefronts before it. Third is the animations for walking. It looks like your character is getting a hernia from jumping. Fourth is the music. EA didn’t bother to get the licensing for the music, so they put in their own mediocre music. Fifth are the sound effects. While good, only about half are from the movies. Sixth is the content. It has less than Destiny, which is saying a lot. The multiplayer has 2 modes, and it gets very, very repetitive. Seventh is the guns. There is no difference between classes, making Battlefront 2 much better, and aiming down sight is useless. Eighth, the dogfights. There is no capital ship combat, making oh-so-terrible, and the existing dogfighting is very, very boring.
In all, while it does have some things going for it, it is also a terrible game. Really, just pick up the decade-old Star Wars Battlefront 2 for 10 dollars on Steam, and it is much better. Thank you for reading.
Written by: Maks