Upper room news

School year 2021-22 continues on at Free Christian School and in its upper room. We continue to work through cold weather – having recess outside when we can and doing events on the inside when we cannot. Like other schools in the area, we are celebrating reading month. We have a program called WHAM! that the students enjoy. I will let the students tell you about some of it as well as about some of our recess activities. The eighth graders are beginning plans for their graduation exercises.  We continue on in our covenant education thankful that we can help our parents bring up their children “in the way they should go.”

WHAM

WHAM stands for working hard accumulating minutes. We start WHAM in the month of February. WHAM is where you read and you get prizes for how much you read. We read mostly at home whenever you have time. On Mondays we set aside fifteen minutes in the day to read. We call this DEAR time which means drop everything and read.

The whole school is separated into three teams. Every Monday you get a slip of paper with the days of the week on it. You write in the sheet however much you read. Then your parents sign it and you hand it in on the next Monday.

We also do outdoor activities to win points. You also want your team to have the most reading minutes to gain points. Later on Monday tables are set up with prizes on it. The prizes have labels of how many minutes they are worth. You can also save your minutes for the next week to try get something better.

We also all have a goal of minutes we need to reach. If the whole school reaches the amount of minutes then we go on a field trip. Hints are put up on the wall so that we can try and guess where we are going to go. This is what WHAM is and how we do it.

Alyvia Brands

WHAM! Games

This year our WHAM! theme is Read for the Stars. We played a few games for WHAM! that have space names.

One game we played was Moon Rocks. When you play Moon Rocks, you have to carry a tin foil rock on a spoon. I liked the game called Silent Planets. I like this game because you have to organize the planets in order without talking to your teammates. Another game was Ring Saturn.  In this game you had to throw hula-hoops around balls. A very challenging game was Musical Planets.  It was challenging because you have to walk around a hula-hoop and grab a ball when the music stops. The last game we did was a space obstacle course. In this obstacle course you had to throw a paper airplane through a hula-hoop, pop a balloon, and throw a ball into a bucket. All the games we played for WHAM! were fun.

Brandon Boverhof

When winter comes it is cold.

It comes fast.

Next we play outside.

The yard is filled with snow.

Entering the snow fort it is warm.

Roaring winds hurt our ears.

Arie Ver Hey

Winter Activities

As we go on through the school year, winter comes upon us fast. When there is snow and ice on the school grounds, it is hard to run and play regular games. We use the new basketball court for a lot of activities like basketball and four-way capture the flag.

This winter, Mr. Hunter researched new middle recess activities for us, and he came up with four-way capture the flag. We started this game a couple of weeks ago, and I find it pretty fun. To set up the game, you have to divide a large rectangle area into four equal parts like a basketball court or a field. Each team has to set up a small square area of cones, and put the other teams’ beanbags in the square. The goal of the game is to collect all of your team’s beanbags, and defend the other teams from getting theirs. When your team collects all of your beanbags, you win the game.

The pastor at our church is Rev. De Boer, and he likes playing with us kids at middle recess. Every year, we pack down an area beside the parsonage to set up a level ground for an ice skating rink. We enjoy this process, because we play football to pack it down. Rev. De Boer sprays the area with water after it is packed down to begin the freezing process. He continues to spray it until all the bumps are out for good skating conditions. Once the bumps are leveled, Rev. De Boer and his son Lucas skate circles around the rest of us playing hockey, but not all of us have skates like them.

When the weather gets warmer, we get happier because we get to play some of the games that we didn’t play in the winter, but we are also sad because we don’t get to play ice hockey with Rev. De Boer. We also know that there will be another winter coming next year, so we just have to wait for it.

Isaiah Brands

Art

In art this year the upper room students are doing different art projects. Mrs. Hunter is our art teacher. We have art usually every Friday. We sketch, paint with water colors, make drawings of different designs and color them with oil pastels. Mrs. Hunter told us that when doing an art project to use three, four and no more colors.

This year we have been working a lot on sketching and shading. A few weeks ago we made a sketch of mountains as a background, and sketched a car. After we did all the sketching we shaded it in using different techniques, like dark and light shading.

We also have been working on using oil pastels. We drew rockets, planets, and buildings; and colored them in with oil pastels for our mural. Our mural was for WHAM! Earlier this year we made a picture of a school of fish with one focal point. The focal point was a fish that was different from the other fish and it stands out. Then we colored all the fish with oil pastels.

The upper room students enjoy doing art. One of my favorite things to do in art is coloring a mosaic, painting a picture, or making objects out of clay.

Abbie Gunnink