Aadvik's Blog: Intersession 2024

Intersession is a week at my school where each 7th and 8th grader chooses different outdoor and indoor activities from a list of options to participate in that aren’t about school. For example, you could get a tour of DC, visit the Spy museum etc. This takes place during Presidents’ Day week and lasts from Tuesday to Friday with a different activity on each day. These are the activities that I chose.

On Tuesday, I visited the Spy Museum and the money museum. In the morning, I took the metro with Amma to the drop of point and then took the metro with my group to the Spy Museum. In the Spy museum, we got badges which could be used to activate missions. Missions were these activities around the museum and if you tapped your badge on it, it would give you your own custom mission. There were also a lot of other activities and exhibits relating to spies. One of my favorites is where you had to look at evidence and decide whether Osama Bin Landan was in a guarded house or not. After the Spy museum, I bought handcuffs at the gift shop. Then, we went to the Money Museum. That is one of the only places in America that prints money. There is only one other in the U.S. We saw where they printed money and I bought golden playing cards that look like dollar notes from the gift shop.

The next day, I went to the World Bank. We arrived in the World Bank and then went to a conference room in which there was a guest speaker who told us about the World Bank. She told us that the World Banks mission was to end poverty and that they do this by giving out loans or grants. Loans are when they give a country money and expect to be payed back on interest and grants are when they give money to countries and don’t ask to be payed back. Grants are only given to low income countries. The World Bank also works to provide countries with basic facilities like food, water, and education. After the talk, we ate at the World Bank cafeteria. I didn’t like the food because I wasn’t able to find anything but there was a lot of good food that I looked over but wasn’t able to find that I like. After the World Bank, we went to the Portrait gallery. There we sat in the courtyard and got snacks from the café. Most of the kids were content to just sit there playing on their phones, but my two friends and I went to see the portraits. It was cool.

On Thursday, we went to NIST. NIST is the National Institute for Standards in Technology. We went to the fire 🔥 research part of it. There, we learned about how fire works by taking a flame apart. We used cooled metal to put over the fire, this made it so that we could see how a fire is hollow. We also learned that a fire needs fuel, heat, and air to work. Later, we played with a computer model of fire by changing the parameters to make it bigger or smaller. We then put on a VR headset and got to see a forest fire in VR. After that, we ate at Taco Bamba and went home.

On the final day, I went to the Health and Medicine museum which also talked about forensics. Before I did that, I went to my school Norwood for a fun morning of Murder Mystery solving. It was very fun. After that, we went to the museum which I hated because they had human body parts on display. We did a small activity and then went home. This would have been my favorite activity but I didn’t like the museum.

Intersession was very fun and my favorite Intersession was The Spy Museum and Money Museum. These were my favorites because they were very fun and two of my friends were with me for this. I had a lot of fun at Intersession and I look forward to next year when I can choose other interesting things to do outside school.

Take a look at some of the pictures I took with my phone and some that my teachers took.