Classroom Wish List
- Expandable garden hose and nozzle, 75 ft
- Potting soil
- Scotch tape refills, transparent
- Correction tape
- Coloring markers
- Retractable writing pens
- Violin bows
- Pitch pipes
- Ice tube tray (for water bottles)

What We’ve Been Reading
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
⚗️ Tiny Apothecary Project 🧪

For their first art project of 2022, students made these mesmerizing elixirs to complement their studies of the Black Death and medieval medicine.
If you want to try making one yourself, fill a bottle halfway with water. Add food coloring and, if you want shimmer, a tiny pinch of mica powder. Fill the rest of the bottle with mineral oil and seal it tightly.
Marble Rollercoasters
Sculpting Calaveras


Building Medieval Torsion-Powered Siege Engines
Sewing Masks
Master Smiths Forging The Finest Plate Armor
Medieval Kingdoms
Mr. Robbins’ strategic management simulation in which students take on the role of the landed aristocracy in medieval Europe
What is your objective?
You are a noble in a medieval kingdom!
You will work to become Emperor; failing that, to not lose your head.
You will work with your fellow nobles, and possibly those of nearby kingdoms, to gain the power to survive various challenges that threaten to destroy your kingdom.
You are a noble, and in addition to smiting your enemies, you must manage your realm. To begin, you own a single Estate, a property you own.
Each turn, you may expand and build or seize new estates. When this occurs, you gain resources from that estate.
An estate’s productions depend on its layout and the feudal contract that tells what it produces in total. Never lose these documents!
All your resources are shared across your estates, so some can produce what others consume. Specializing your estates is probably wise.
You keep track of all your possessions in your Ledger , a simple spreadsheet. Never lose your ledger!

Sewing autumnal plush Pumpkins
History & Social Sciences
Mr. Robbins’ program is a three-year rotation. Taken as a complete cycle, the three years provide a complete overview of western civilization, as well as introductions to numerous other cultures and peoples.
Year 1 covers Ancient Civilizations, spanning from early civilization in the Near East to the decline and dissolution of the Greco-Roman world. Students participate in two simulation games: the Cities of Greece, where they work with teammates to plan and expand a Greek city state in the classical period, followed by the Legions of Rome, where each student becomes a senator in the old Roman republic, striving to obtain power, and, ultimately, seek the imperial laurel.

Year 2 takes students into the Middle and early Modern ages, beginning with the tumultuous European middle ages. Students participate in the Kingdoms game, where they guide their feudal dynasty through centuries of trade, intrigue, and of course, castle-building. We then enter the renaissance and age of exploration, culminating in the settlement of what will become the United States of America. In our Merchant Princes game, set in the complex 17th-18th centuries, students build commercial empires and seed the modern world as they chart the entire globe for the first time in human history.

Year 3 focuses on the modern period, beginning with the French Revolution and following the expansion of industrialism and modern ideology across the world. We follow US history through the 19th-century and the World Wars, typically ending with the Cold War. Our overarching simulation, the Great Game, is a lighthearted spy game based on codebreaking and globetrotting, where the students seek to manipulate the emerging nations of the world into their own personal empires.

Travis Robbins earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in History from UC Davis. After graduating, Mr. Robbins was a paraprofessional educator for the Sonoma County Office of Education. He also served as a director for the Forestville Water District where he oversaw initiatives to improve water conversation across the district, as well as managed a wastewater recycling program.
Now a teacher at VCS, he provides instruction to our 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classroom. He strives to instill his high level of enthusiasm for history in his students through a combination of self-directed research projects, collaborative academic games, and multidisciplinary assignments that show the social sciences never need to be boring.