Gap School in October!

Yellow Mushrooms with Emily and Virginia

The Yellow Mushrooms have been hard at work preparing for this quarter's Community Day! As we built our community as a class, we supported each other during exploration and daily transitions, shouted out friends during our end of day meetings, and worked as a team to Zoom In and get final projects set and ready to go for our GAP School families!

In ELA, we are continuing our book study of Zoey and Sassafras. We are on the second book in the series, Monsters and Mold. Our book study helps us identify the front cover, back cover, author, illustrator, characters, and setting. Going forward, we will also incorporate themes, main characters, beginning, middle and end through the "Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then" method of analysis.

In Math, we have been diving deep into our addition and subtraction practice to build fluency. We have learned many different strategies to add, including counting on, finding a friend of ten, making friendly numbers, and using manipulatives. We have played many games, including math safari, I sea ten, and go fish to practice these skills. We even used a bucket, water, and rocks to help demonstrate a missing addend. We have also been helping to support writing letters facing the correct direction and building strong hand muscles and fine motor skills. 

As a class, we are practicing structured literacy to support our progress as readers and writers! By saying our alphabet chant, we have a cheer to refer to while learning letter sounds. This is supportive as we learn the alphabet as well as when we are beginning to read. Yellow Mushrooms are working hard as they apply their phonics to CVC words. Games we love to play to support our reading are Blah, Blah, Blah, roll and reads, and word searches. Other topics we are working on are alphabetical order, letter formations, and zooming into a different letter each week. As we become writers, we put pencil to paper, sound out CVC words, refer to our alphabet chant, and correspond letters with their sounds.

Red Hamsters with Lauren 

This month, we have become more attuned to the birds that surround us here in our outdoor classroom at GAP School. We have used field guides to identify the bird species that we saw and improved our skills at accurately identifying bird calls. The Learners were able to debut some of their sit spot auditory maps during our Community Day. These were full of personalized bird counting tactics, practice with tally marking skills, and notes about birds that were sighted versus those that were only heard. We are working to create our own field guide, using the Learners’ collection of the birds at Water Chicken Way, for our GAP School community. 

Data collection has become the focus of many of our recent conversations as we explore what it means to have precise, accurate, and reliable information. We discussed ways that we could find reliable information and practiced how to best use some of the resources that we found. When we collected our own data as a class, we noticed that there were many factors that could have affected the reliability of our collection. The Learners highlighted that it was important to visit our sit spots at the same time each day for auditory mapping, potentially even on the same day in the week, and perhaps to sit there for the same length of time at each visit. These are all ideas that were floated around as we tried to collectively pinpoint some of the qualities that made our data the most trustworthy and likely to create “repeatable” findings. 

All of this data is beginning to find its way into various forms of graphing and ways to make our information visual. We began to use bar graphs to display our data and continued to practice with this during our recent field trip to Fruit Hill Orchard. The Learners came up with categories for the different types of damage that the fruit might incur and assessed their apple collection for the percentage of damage in each category. This information was then checked by another Learner to see if they both had similar outcomes in their math before they compiled the data into bar graphs as a whole group. We used some of our work with fractions to talk through this activity as well. It was fun having practical applications for our fraction work so soon after the Learners were introduced to them! 

In mathematics, we continue to work on multiplication facts as we perfect our skills in adding and subtracting three-digit numbers using exchanges. We have been using word problems and reading time in our weekly math routines, and we are beginning to incorporate some of these skills as we move forward with more formalized data collection. The Red Hamsters are becoming much more confident with measurement, which will also be an asset in our upcoming projects! 

The Red Hamsters completed their collection of three-syllable words for each letter of the alphabet, as well as all of the various digraphs and blends! The Word Collector activity has had far-reaching applications, from its review of root words, prefixes and suffixes to expanding a vast vocabulary development, incentivizing using the dictionary, practicing phonics, and more. It has been a great learning activity and so much fun for the Red Hamsters to create huge lists of words! The Learners have studied compound words, the format of a letter and address, and have been reviewing the various parts of speech, along with their role in sentences. The Red Hamsters are more consistently applying their knowledge of correct capitalization, punctuation, and self-editing skills in their writing and continue to excitedly seek the accurate spelling of words. We have also worked on singular and plural nouns and the appropriate use of -ed when writing past-tense verbs. 

This autumn season continues to inspire us each day as we're learning outdoors with our community at GAP!

Silver Serpents with Furn and Elijah

It is no understatement to say that the Silver Serpents are enjoying a fantastic fall season! This October deepened our sense of class community and stretched our academic skill-sets. Furn and Elijah have noticed that the Silver Serpents are taking responsibility for their class culture. They are working hard to follow our guiding principles by showing kindness and support to their peers, using active listening including body language during group meetings, and navigating through challenges by asking for help. The Serpents are demonstrating sustained social and emotional growth more evenly throughout our days. 

We are extremely proud of the hard work each Silver has poured into our Brain Blast time. This quarter in ELA, we extended our learning about Nonfiction Text Features, started exploring synonyms and antonyms, and concluded the month with our first major foray into the writing process. After finding our way around field guides that caught our eyes, we spent time identifying the locations and purposes of specific features in specific texts. By examining these field guides and their features, we are able to identify what a nonfiction text looks like, where to look for information, and how to cite what pages we find that information on. Additionally, we have incorporated synonym and antonym study in our Morning Meetings, which the Serpents have shown excitement, curiosity, and proficiency in when using these word games! Finally, we undertook our first major project (and major win!) with our GAP School Thanksgiving Address for Community Day. Pulling on our knowledge of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address reading from September, the Serpents practiced their brainstorming, pre-writing, drafting, editing, and speaking techniques to create our class project. Each Silver also contributed to a collaborative rubric where we discussed features and requirements of a successful paragraph and the writing process. Likewise, each Silver moved through the writing process with diligence, focus, and responsibility for their work. We are excited to see where our growing skills with writing take us as we prepare to study words and stories closely in the coming months!

During Math, we have seen the Silver Serpents begin serious journeys as mathematicians. As we step deeper into the world of foundational operations, like multiplication and division, the Silvers face harder and more complex problems. From decoding word problems, multiplying two- (and sometimes, three) digit numbers with the box-method, and one-digit to two-digit division problems, we’ve likewise applied our skills to Community Day. We created a Math Trail Mix by measuring and adding in grams, doubling or tripling recipes, estimating attendance numbers, and dividing our servings accordingly. Wow! It was so exciting that we could use simple operation to help us through aspects of everyday life.

We have had a beautiful and busy October in Silver Science! We started off the month exploring structure and function through designing fossils that showcased animal structures, and writing paragraphs that described the functions of these adaptations. This process involved a brainstorming phase, a design sheet, and multiple phases of drafting. We made our fossils with salt dough and they turned out so great! We finished off our Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems unit about halfway through the month by learning about how animals and plants are impacted by environmental changes. Learners worked through multiple scenarios, and learned about making informed decisions using data gathered in texts. After playing a review game, "Boom!", it was time to move on to our next unit - Forces and Interactions. We started the unit by brainstorming how crucial forces and interactions are for our existence. We asked questions like: Could the world even exist without gravity? We then went over some definitions, used erasers to demonstrate balanced vs. unbalanced forces, and used a coin to help us see how friction affects motion. We thought like architects and used paper straws to build structures that could hold up books by balancing the force of gravity on the books. We then played a "Forces and Motion Would You Rather" game and wrote up some reasoning for our answers. Finally, we started to look more into the force of magnetism! We are excited to keep rolling with this unit as we move into November.

Emerald Elk with Corrie and Luke

The Emerald Elk have had a fantastic October! To kick it all off, we experienced some early cold weather that prompted us to bundle up and review our fire building skills. We practiced flexibility by relocating our classroom to The Village, where the Elk quickly settled into a new environment and got to work!

In math, the Elk continued a review of multiplication strategies by investigating and mastering both traditional multiplication and the box method. These skills then transferred into an exploration of dividing using the box method, as well as long division. Learners applied their math strategies while multiplying and dividing a trail mix recipe, and later calculating the area and perimeter of the Pavilion, Astroplex Court, and Gaga Pit. Our “Elder Elk”, pursuing 6th and 7th-grade content, “leveled up” their math skills by learning powers of ten to do calculations with trail mix and more complex area calculations, like composite shapes and octagons. 

In ELA, the Elk kicked off October by beginning a new novel study! Learners chose to read either Thanhha Lai’s Inside out and Back Again or Enrique Flores-Galbis’ 90 Miles to Havana, and then embarked on background research of each novel’s respective setting. While the former novel takes place in Vietnam and the latter in Cuba, we discovered that both are set during the Cold War, and learned about the differences between communism and capitalism through a simulation wherein students were paid peanuts to collect acorns. As we dug into our reading, the Elk practiced visualization techniques and learned to identify different types of literary devices that authors use to enhance their writing. This exploration culminated in Learners creating posters defining and providing examples of each literary device. 

For our big Community Day project, the Elk tied together all that they had been working on in both math and ELA, and then added a dash of social studies (as well as lots of sugar). 

SEL with Janelle

The Yellow Mushrooms spent a lot of October working on self regulation, self expression, and emotion identification through mud and leaf play. We’ve adopted Wander Wednesdays so we can explore our amazing surroundings and practice our social emotional learning through organic play. We have been encouraging extra focus on "I feel" statements. We worked really hard on bringing our calm corner to life. We still have so many more ideas for it! The Yellow Mushrooms helped move logs, finger knit decorations, and hang signs for visual reminders of how to calm an angry, anxious, or sad spot. We made calm corner tickets, added some original art work, and carved out a special spot for meditation. We can't wait to keep adding on to this peaceful space. We've leaned into conversations about respect and self respect, and identified ways that we can show respect to our physical work space as well as the Learners and Educators we share our days with.  As tools to help us stay calm we attempted to make playdough (and will keep trying), made calm down jars, and even made pumpkin slime after carving out pumpkins. 

Imaginative play, communicating and normalizing all emotions, encouraging kindness to everyone, and pointing out different emotions or experiences during reading time are all valuable ways to keep supporting your Learners in their social emotional learning journeys.  Please reach out if you’d like more ways to incorporate this at home.  

The Red Hamsters are working hard to expand their expression and understanding of kindness, self expression, and self regulation. They completed a kindness pool to explore the ripple effect, observed how acts of kindness spread to others through a milk and food coloring interactive activity, and made a daisy chain of acts of kindness that they can add on to that is hung in their calm area. The Red Hamsters eagerly created calm down jars for their calm corner as tools to aide them in staying calm or returning to a calm headspace when big emotions pop up throughout their day. On the flip side of this, we discussed our angry buttons and what pushes them while recognizing that we are all different and unique in this area. We used balloons as tools to demonstrate what happens if we forget to dial into our angry spots. When the balloon popped we discussed useful strategies to manage this very normal emotion before it got out of control. They have been working hard to make their daily expectations for active and interactive listening successful, and have created signs with visual reminders to hang in their spaces.  

We have also been leaning into Wander Wednesday to explore different areas of our incredible classroom and implement social emotional learning in the wild. Walking in nature is a self regulating and grounding activity and a great way to clear our minds or share our thoughts. 

Knowledge Seekers and Projects with Ryan and Max

The month of October had us preparing for campfire season at camp school. We spent the month exploring fire science through a variety of experiments and fire building challenges. Our month wrapped up exploring some campfire cooking by making applesauce, disecting apples, and setting up some decomposition experiments.

While exploring fire, Learners tested different ways of building a fire lay (how you place your tinder and kindling before lighting) as well as different ways to light a fire such as flint and steel and bow drill.

We experimented with a variety of different improvised fire starters such as newspaper, cotton balls with petroleum jelly, gauze with hand sanitizer, Fat Wood (a natural fire starter foraged from evergreen trees), and a Dorito! Learners tracked the length of time each fire starter burned as well as recording temperature data with a digital thermometer.

Our fire studies culminated with each Flock co-creating a set of fire safety expectations. By creating these expectations together Learners demonstrated their understanding of the necessary safety elements needed to have succesful campfires at school.

At the end of the month, we used apples from the Red Hamster field trip to make apple sauce for our first community day along with everyone participating in apple disections. We deepened our understanding of what makes a fruit a fruit by observing, and tasting, parts of apples.