LEAP Waynesville

08/04/2026

Mark your calendars! The LEAP Center calendar dates for the 2026-2027 school year are set.

Please note that while our events typically take place on Thursday evenings, our 1st Semester Shine Night will be held on Wednesday, December 9, to avoid scheduling conflicts with other district events.

2026-2027 Event Schedule:

* LEAP Open House
Thursday, August 27 | 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Welcoming returning students in grades 1–6

* 1st Semester Shine Night
Wednesday, December 9 | 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

* 2nd Semester Shine Night
Thursday, April 8 | 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

* Gifted Field Day
Spring 2027 | Date TBD

All events take place at the LEAP Center at Waynesville Middle School. We look forward to seeing our LEAP families throughout the year!

07/30/2026

Three of our LEAP teachers—Mrs. Wallace, Mrs. Koeppel, and Ms. Selle—had an incredible time presenting at the Innovation Summit in Branson this week!

The team loves sharing strategies on how gifted students can be challenged and supported outside of the gifted classroom:

Podcast to Proficiency: Building Communication and Digital Literacy Through Podcasting (Ms. Selle) – Using digital tools to strengthen student communication, digital literacy, and voice.

Breaking the Busy Work Cycle: Authentic Enrichment for Advanced Learners (Mrs. Wallace, Mrs. Koeppel, & Ms. Selle) – Shifting from "more work" to deeper thinking through high-level inquiry and challenge.

We are excited to bring this energy and inspiration back to our classrooms!

06/30/2026

Perfect attendance paid off for two of our LEAP students! What a great way to wrap up our first ever LEAP summer school! We have more pictures and videos to share from our Route 66 units. We’ll be sharing them soon!

🚲🎉 Congratulations to our Perfect Attendance Bicycle Winners! 🎉🚲

Showing up every day matters, and we’re proud to celebrate the students who made attendance a priority!

All students who achieved perfect attendance were entered into a special drawing, and two students from each building were randomly selected to take home a brand-new bicycle! 🚴‍♀️🚴‍♂️

Congratulations to our lucky winners, and thank you to all of our students and families for making attendance a priority. Every day in school is an opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed!

06/18/2026

Well, all good things must come to an end eventually. We’ve had a great time at CYBER.ORG EdCon 26 in Reno, Nevada and cannot wait to see how we can bring some of our new knowledge into the classroom.

-Mrs. Wallace and Ms. Selle

06/18/2026

Here’s our final clue: From our hotel, we can see mountains whose name means “snow-covered mountains range.”

We’ll reveal where we’ve been adventuring and learning after our conference ends today, so stay tuned!

-Mrs. Wallace and Ms. Selle

06/18/2026

Clue 6 is our final clue for today and our penultimate clue for this challenge.

Here’s your clue: We’re in another time zone, that is true. To decode our message below , look at the clock to shift the alphabet, too!

epccrgleq dpmk pclm!

We’ll be back with our final clue tomorrow morning!
-Mrs. Wallace and Ms. Selle

06/17/2026

We’re back with another clue to our location! Here’s clue 5:
The city hosting us right now has also hosted the Olympic Games!

-Mrs. Wallace and Ms. Selle

06/17/2026

It’s a double post kind of morning! If our last clue from yesterday was a little confusing with all the zeros and ones, see if ASCII can help!

Here’s this morning’s clue: In 1850, there was a rush to mine a precious metal in this state. That metal still factors into the state’s identity today!

Have you figured out where we are yet?
-Mrs. Wallace and Ms. Selle

06/17/2026

In our LEAP classes, we love using pigpen ciphers and cryptography to stretch our students' thinking skills. Yesterday, Mrs. Wallace took those exact concepts into the future at a session on human-AI communication!

As you can see, she explored how the logic behind traditional ciphers translates perfectly into the "languages" and prompts we use to talk with artificial intelligence. It’s practical example of how the critical thinking skills we teach in LEAP apply directly to real-world, cutting-edge technology.

06/17/2026

Since we’ve spent the day learning about data privacy (among other topics), we thought clue 3 should encrypt the secret of our location. Your clue is:
01010010 and 01001110

We’ll give more clues and a nudge on how to solve this one tomorrow morning!