Pinnacle Academy

This past December students took at field trip to Curiosity Zone in Broadlands, Virginia. Our Kindergarten through third grade students were able to participate in a large hands-on experiment. Students even left Curiosity Zone with goodie bags to conduct another experiment at home.  It was a great day!

During Summer Camp, one of our weekly themes was "Air and Wind".  We went to the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum at Dulles.  If you've never been there, it is really worth the trip!  The children enjoyed seeing all of the airplanes, and also the helicopters and hang-gliders.  We also marveled at how big the space shuttle is, and how its outside surface isn't actually smooth and shiny.  We talked about how cool it would be to fly into space!  We also enjoyed looking at the displays of model aircraft and uniforms.  There were some neat computer screens in front of some of the exhibits where you could "tour" the cockpits of some of the planes.  The children eagerly took turns at those, fascinated at how you could look all over the place and even "activate" some of the functions of the planes on the screens.  It was a great field trip!

During our first week of Summer Camp, we had fun learning about water.  To fully experience the wonders of water, we went to the Sprayground at the Fairfax Corner Shopping Center.  It was SO much fun!  We took our snacks along, and ate picnic-style in the area adjacent to the spraying fountain.  It was a great way to spend a morning, and a cool wet experience on a hot summer day! 

During our 4th week of Summer Camp, we took a field trip to the National Building Museum in D.C.  They have a fascinating display of Lego Architecture, with many famous buildings and monuments constructed completely out of Lego bricks.  It was amazing to see how big the Lego buildings were.  The highlight of the field trip though was when the children entered the second part of the Lego exhibit, where they could sit down and create their own Lego buildings from a huge assortment of Lego pieces.  The room was filled with the sounds of children talking and searching through trays of Legos as they designed their creations. 

On Thursday, April 26, 2012, students in 1st - 4th grades attended their long anticipated art field trip to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in downtown Washington DC. Students got to experience the benefits of two great museums in just one visit!

We had a great trip to the National Gallery of Art  in Washington, DC on Friday, March 16, 2012. Students in 5th – 7th grade split up into 3 groups for this trip, each group with a different docent (tour guide) who explained the significance of each work of art and art movement. We decided to focus on French Art from Baroque  to Neo-impressionism  because of general student interest from PA’s first field trip to the National Gallery of Art in December 2009 . Our 7th graders are currently working on a French Art power point presentation, focusing on an art movement of their choice, for Art class this quarter.

On Thursday, March 15th, Pinnacle Academy's kindergarten, first, and second grade classes took a trip to Port Discovery Children's Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. At the museum, the students took part in many hands-on activities, from math projects to science experiments. The kindergarten class learned about the uses of water in Water Works, where they made miniature  oceans, rivers, and streams. They even got to stand inside a giant bubble! First and second grade worked together on geometric art projects and searched for clues to a mummy's curse in the Egypt Archeology exhibit. It was definitely one of our favorite trips, hands down!

Our 7th and 8th graders had a wonderful time in their field trip to Marian Koshland Science Museum in DC on Friday, Febuary 17. The students enojoyed this field trip immensely, while learning a lot about science at the same time. Please see below for other educational field trips scheduled for coming months.

On Friday, November 4th, Pinnacle Academy's first, second, and third grades visited the American Indian Museum in Washington D.C. At the museum they watched a traditional dance from a Chippowa tribe, built Lakota, Inuit, and Pueblo people homes inside the interactive kid's room, and looked at some interesting artifacts. The students were particularly interested in the remains of clay pots, kachina dolls, and woven baskets, which belong to the tribes studied in second grade. It was a great field trip to kick off the Native American Heritage Month and I know the students want to go back next year!

On Monday, October 17, our Pinnacle Academy preschool, pre-K, and kindergarten students, teachers and volunteers enjoyed a fun filled, busy day at our Annual Cox Farms Day.  Slippery slides, milking cows, bumpy hayrides and lots more fun were enjoyed by all! Students were able to make classroom connections with how pumpkins grow as they counted and explored pumpkins, haystacks, and animals in action.  Lunchtime included a live musical performance with some students choosing to dance and others sing along.  Each child left tired, happy, and with a little pumpkin in hand!