Celebrating Success: Student Success at World Affairs Challenge and County Science Fair Competitions

Dear ISM Community,

Welcome Back from Spring Break!

ISM middle school students participated in two significant competitions at the beginning and end of our Spring Break and our ISM students performed extremely well! Here’s the exciting news:

1. 2009 World Affairs Challenge (WAC)
The World Affairs Challenge (WAC), hosted by World Savvy, was held on Saturday, March 14th at the San Francisco State University and over 250 middle school students from around the Bay area participated in the event. Mr. Greg Zugrave, ISM's 7th grade Language Arts and Social Studies instructor, served as the staff coach to our 7th grade students and he was aided by parent coaches, Marie Butcher and Kate McKenna. Our 7th graders placed in every category but one, to include the Best Overall Team, Best Formal Presentation, Best Discovery Poster, Best Collaborative Question, and Best Global Awareness Quiz categories, which is extremely impressive given that this was the first World Affairs Challenge experience for ISM and our 7th graders!

Here's a brief overview:
12 plus ISM students awarded for their work on the Collaborative Question
3rd Place for Misha Polovneff on the Global Awareness Quiz
3rd Place for Best Discovery Poster-Team Rainbow
3rd Place for Best Presentation-Team Rainbow
2nd Place Overall-The Wash Ups
1st Place Overall-Team Rainbow

Thank you to all staff, students, and parents who contributed to this success! Please refer to the following link to see more detailed information about the World Savvy competition results:
http://worldsavvy.org/programs/wac-2009-awards.php

2. 2009 Monterey County Science & Engineering Science Fair
This past weekend on Saturday, March 28th, ISM 6th, 7th (1 student), and 8th grade students participated in the annual Monterey County Science Fair at CSUMB. Overall, we had 78 students representing ISM with 34 science projects. Following the awards ceremony on Sunday, March 29th, we had 30 student winners, with 9 students going onward to the California State Science Fair! The State Fair will be held May 18-19, 2009 and will be hosted by the California Science Center (formerly, the California Museum of Science and Industry). Again this year, ISM students performed very strongly and proved competent not only in their board displays, project journal and reports, but also in their ability to communicate orally in discussing and presenting detailed information concerning their respective projects to the event judges.

Thank you to ISM instructors Dave Brandau, Paul Lane, and Stephanie Zugrave for all of their guidance and support to our students throughout the Science Fair process, as well as to parents who continue to enthusiastically commit time and effort in support of the Science Fair teams and projects. For detailed results, please refer to the link below:

http://dbdriven.brinkster.net/mcsf/AwardWinners2009.asp

In both of these social science and life/physical science competitions, ISM students again displayed a high degree of academic excellence, frankly dominating their competition at both of these events. Our inquiry and project-based curriculum continues to benefit our students as they successfully compete each year in these externally-evaluated academic events.

Regards,

Lisa Griffin Burns