Granger high school
Tri-Color Times An open forum for student opinion and expression
TRICOLORTIMES.COM
DECEMBER 2017 LX-IV
Lancers find many ways to celebrate Christmas By Natalie Aiono CHRISTMAS is coming up fast. There are many ways people celebrate the holiday. Some people gather with family, others with friends, a lot with both. With all the diversity at Granger High School, there are many ways Lancers get down for this festive holiday. All around, there is no right way to celebrate. Christmas is a time to spread love and holiday cheer. Shayna Toomer (12) has lots of fun with his family during this holiday. “My family and I wake up and open presents. After that, we go to our grandpa’s house and eat homemade vegan chili. It’s a tradition. We do it every year. We love hanging out with our grandpa, we only get to see him once
a year,” she said. Toomer enjoys quality family time. Christmas traditions are a very common thing. Luis Acosta (12) gets in the holiday mood with traditional family foods. “Every Christmas, we make tamales and pozole. We also decorate with a Christmas tree, lights, and stuff in the front yard. My favorite Christmas memory would be when I got an Xbox 360 back in 2007,” he said. He loves Christmas very much and can’t wait for it to come. The snowy holiday can be enjoyed with a variety of people, not just family. Jessica Gonzalez (12) celebrates with neighbors as well as family. “My family gets together with our neighbors and their family, and we do a gift
exchange. After that, we have a Christmas party. My favorite present I’ve gotten was a big makeup box from my neighbors. I love Christmas,” Gonzalez said. Some people get outdoors. Daniel Wood (11) likes to celebrate with friends in the snow. “In the morning, I open presents with my family and we drink hot chocolate. After that, my friends and I go sledding and have snowball fights. It gets really intense but it’s a lot of fun. Then we go to Ihop to eat. My favorite part is the snowball fights. I love to hit my friends in the face with giant snowballs,” Wood said. This Lancer really knows how to celebrate Christmas. Cooking is a very common thing to do on Christmas. Luis
Gonzalez (9) loves to cook on Christmas. “I wake up really early with my mom and we start cooking. We make a crab salad, and honey ham. My favorite dish we make is probably the tater tot casserole. When we’re done cooking, we wake up the family to open presents and eat,” he said. He is very excited to celebrate this year. Christmas is a wonderful holiday that brings families together. Everybody gathers around to open gifts and spend time together. It is a very beautiful holiday and should be celebrated in stride. Make sure to take time out of the day to enjoy the snow. Spread holiday cheer and maybe do something nice on this joyful day.
Luis Acosta celebrates Christmas with food and decorations and gifts, and he’s spreading holiday cheer in a peppermint-stripe sweater..
Lancers’ Christmas movie picks mirror national media faves By Michael Gil Ceballos CHRISTMAS season has arrived, and a lot of Lancers are excited. Many Lancers have movies that they watch with their families every Christmas, as it is a tradition for them. Lancers love a wide variety of seasonal films. “My favorite Christmas movie is Disney Princess: A Christmas of Enchantment (2005). It has become a tradition for me and my family to watch it every year,” Ada Montejo (10) said. “It might be a movie for small children, but I still love it a lot, and I will probably watch it as a grown up. The movie has an awesome moral that I love,” Montejo said. “All of Disney’s most beloved princesses join together for one unforgettable enchanted evening,” as stated on the rot-
tentomatoes.com website. It has an average audience score of 68 percent from the popular Rotten Tomatoes movie review website. Christmas is all about family and friends coming together to celebrate. A good way of doing this is to watch a Christmas classic. The website suburbiaunwrapped.com lists Home Alone (1990) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1967) as two of the most popular family Christmas movies. Home Alone is a popular movie with Lancers, too. “My favorite Christmas movie is Home Alone, I love how funny it is, every time I watch it with my family, we cannot stop laughing,” Perla Gaona (10) said. Home Alone has an average audience score of 79 percent, while How the Grinch Stole
Christmas has an audience score of 88 percent, both from the rottentomatoes.com website. These two movies have both kept their fame through the years and could both be considered as classics. Most people would agree that what makes Home Alone popular is that it’s familyfriendly and the movie offers a healthy form of comedy. Some of Home Alone’s critic reviews say very good things. “[A] surprisingly charming film,” as stated by Caryn James on the nytimes.com website. “Its endearing story and a charming performance by Culkin make Home Alone a standout among the usual holiday movie fare,” as stated by Marjorie Kase on the commonsensemedia.org website said.
Another popular Christmas movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Nightmare Before Christmas is about Jack Skellington, Halloween’s adored pumpkin king who is bored of the same routine that his city has every year. Skellington decides to change it up a bit, and he decides to bring Halloween and Christmas together. This movie received an average audience score of 91 percent from the rottentomatoes.com website. Some people prefer to watch movies during the Christmas season while others might prefer to watch TV shows that offer special Christmas episodes. Either way, what matters most is that both forms of entertainment bring families and friends together during the Christmas season.
Field Trips at GHS By Gabriela Thompson FIELD trips are common at Granger High School. Every week there’s at least one class or club planning on visiting a certain place. One of those cool field trips that was planned by biology’s Mr. Lewis to Tracy Aviary located in downtown in Liberty Park. “Tracy Aviary inspires curiosity and caring for birds and nature through education and conservation,” as stated on the tracyaviary. org website. This field trip certainly helped students connect some of their inclass learning to the real world. The aviary offers tours for specific age groups and all-ages groups. One of the all-ages ones is the Sense-ational Stream Exploration. Participants learn to use their senses as they study Utah’s streams, rivers, the aviary’s stream ecosystem, and how they affect wildlife. Another is Conservation, where guests learn about the many species of endangered birds and one-of-a-kind conservation stories. “The purpose was to introduce our students to the many opportunities in our community to see and experience wildlife,” Mr. Lewis said. As a wildlife biology teacher, Mr. Lewis teaches his students about biodiversity and how putting many different species in a self-sustaining environment. Students begin the process of understanding that each species has its role in maintaining balance in an ecosystem. Tracy Aviary is the first of four opportunities for students to experience the natural world in the past or present. The biology department next plans to take students to Thanksgiving Point Dinosaur Museum, Living Planet Aquarium, and a Utah National Park. Each of these trips is taken in one of the four quarters throughout the school year. “The students today may have to describe what it was like to see some of these creatures in real life to their own children, for it may be one of the species that could vanish,” he said. Mr. Lewis encourages students to enjoy these hands-on and real-world experiences. In having these hands-on experiences, Granger Lancers are able to understand their biology classes better while spending time with their friends. Ask the biology teachers when the next fascinating field trips are being held.
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