September at Gap School!

Yellow Mushrooms with Emily and Virginia

In ELA, the Yellow Mushrooms have been working hard as we learn to write our first and last names, study letters of the week, and learn the order of the alphabet using letter cards and saying sound chants together. To learn our first and last name, we practiced writing through copy work in our writer's notebooks. Some Learners are writing and using lined paper on their own and others are gaining fine motor practice by tracing the letters in their names. As we study our letters of the week, we read a daily message on Mondays that supports us as we learn to read from the left to the right and identify tone of voice with punctuation marks. We also locate our letter of the week by putting on our “letter goggles”. Here we use our hands to form circles around our eyes to find our letter of the week in our message. We identify our letter by stating its size and shape, specifying if it's tall, short, made up of curved lines, or made up of straight lines. As the weeks go on, we are practicing sound production and letter formation using lined paper and white boards.

We are continuing our book study, Zoey and Sassafras Dragons and Marshmallows, to help us understand parts of a book and story. This includes: front cover, back cover, title, author, illustrator, characters, and setting. 

In math, we have been exploring teen numbers and the idea of place value. We understand that the tens place tells us how many groups of ten there are in a number, and the ones place tells us how many ones there are. We are now very good at identifying teen numbers and counting up to 20! In order to practice place value, we have really enjoyed playing “Place Value Safari” or “Math Safari” to cement our knowledge! We also have started using strategies for addition problems within 20, like counting on or using our fact families. We will continue this into October and make a book helping us to remember our doubles facts! 

In science, we have begun to explore the season of fall and the weather. We talked about the seasons and why the seasons change, and especially what fall looks like. We tackled both outside in nature and what activities we enjoy in fall. We also explored the water cycle where we did a super fun experiment with shaving cream, food coloring, and water to show how rain can form from the clouds. We learned a fun water cycle song as well. You can ask your Learner to sing it for you at home!

If you are interested in seeing where your child is at academically or social-emotionally, feel free to schedule a parent teacher conference with Virginia and Emily.

Red Hamsters with Lauren 

We have been experiencing a shower of acorns in our outdoor classroom and the Learners have happily collected them for future projects! In addition to the recent acorn collection, the prior month’s extensive collection of autumn olive berries has recently culminated in the students’ recipe for delicious fruit leather! Projects have been an exciting part of the Red Hamster conversations as the students have been able to move forward with some of the plans they’ve had for making things. Recently, the rainy days have been magical at GAP School and we have been enjoying our explorations in the mud and at our creek, Water Chicken Way. 

Our read aloud book, Island of the Blue Dolphins, came to a close, but it was only the beginning for the work it inspired! The learners have been discovering more about The "Lone Woman" and her time on the remote island of San Nicolas. We’ve explored the Channel Islands National Park remotely in Google Maps and have been able to locate some of the sites where the Lone Woman hunted and sought shelter. We have also been learning about the plant and animal species of the island and how they contributed to her sustaining herself for the 18 years that she lived alone on the island. The Red Hamsters have begun creative writing projects to tell their stories of what might’ve happened to the Lone Woman’s native people when they left the island. Due to their special request, we will be reading the sequel, Zia, as our upcoming read aloud book. 

In ELA, the students have been working on their editing skills. We revisited their stories to search for ways to improve and edit their work. They are eagerly seeking the accurate spelling for words. We practice spelling when collecting words for our Word Collector project and regularly apply our referencing skills in dictionary searches! We continue to build our skills on root words and how the meaning of a word can be altered with different prefixes and suffixes. 

In math, the Red Hamsters have been applying their understanding of number sequencing to identify numbers that are greater than, less than, and equal to one another with the appropriate symbols. We have also been identifying odd and even numbers in both our environment and in some silly stories! The students have been asking for extra challenging math problems and some have worked their addition magic into the billions! We continue to practice showing all of our work when writing problems and the steps for carrying. Place value has been another skill that we are visiting regularly and we continue to play games to correctly identify the values. Lastly, telling time has been a daily game that many of the students love. We are even getting requests for military time challenges!

Silver Serpents with Furn and Elijah

For the Silver Serpents, this September was filled with community building, the early excitements of Brain Blast, and rainy day adventures! Early in the month, we introduced the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. The address is a central invocation of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations) that focuses our attention on peace and gratitude for the world and life communities around us. Each section of the address ends with the phrase “and now our minds are one,” which helps join our community together in our common goals. This practice helps expand and reinforce our sense of GAP School community as we grow as a flock this year. Together, we recited the address before our epic summit of Kinser’s Climb! At Kinser’s, we dove into developing our Nature Journal skills by describing the plants around us.

As we continue easing into our Brain Blast time, the Silver Serpents have worked hard to establish our academic, group meeting, and interpersonal expectations. Kindness and curiosity always guide our inquiry. Together, we spent time pausing and reflecting on how we want our time together to look and feel like. To do this, we set group goals, individual goals, thought through behavioral cause and effect, and actively practiced kindness to each other by creating a class Compliment Wall. How we share appreciation for each other matters, and the Silver Serpents continue to flex their gratitude muscles as we become a closer class community.

In September, we kicked off our science academic time by following the steps of an inquiry cycle to solve a mystery - Who stole Max’s sandwich? We use inquiry cycles across subjects, so understanding this process is key to our learning at GAP School. Next, we began our first unit, Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems, by decoding some tough vocabulary to figure out what this unit is all about. We started by focusing on different types of animal social groups. Learners used graphic organizers to help understand animal group structures and the survival advantages they gain by being in that group. We nature journaled ants and made inferences about their lives and purposes based on their behaviors. What job might this ant have? How does your ant benefit from the other ants in its colony? We talked about how humans live in an animal group, and we too all have specific jobs and roles to help our grouping succeed. Learners got to find out how engineers use concepts from animal groups to successfully design things, like automatic grocery delivery. In these systems, each robot has one very specialized task, but together the robots can complete complicated tasks. Learners then brainstormed their very own robot systems that could help automate tasks in their lives.

The topic we are presently exploring is Adaptations, so we reviewed what adaptations are and started diving into our cross-cutting concept of structure and function. We looked at fossils of present day and prehistoric animals and made inferences of what habitats and features these animals may have based on their structures. Learners are super excited to dive into our first project of the year - an exploration of structure and function through fossil making!

During Math time, the Serpents have been hard at work practicing their skills with multiplication and fractions! Together, we’ve practiced looking at multiplication from many angles: dot groups, arrays, word problems, number problems, and many multiplication games. The Serpents are showing excitement and growth as we slither into tricky fractions. By folding them into our Morning Meetings, the Serpents enjoy fun, silly, and engaging questions about fractions. These bite-sized chunks help us digest key concepts while expanding our number sense.

For ELA, the Silvers are exploring the features of nonfiction texts. Through scavenger hunts, writing practice, and guided exploration, we’ve aimed to answer questions such as: Why do we use a Field Guide? What is the purpose of a Table of Contents? An index? Where do we find them? How do we use them? Why are they helpful to us? To investigate these questions, we’ve looked at key text features, their purposes, and continue to practice identifying them in real nonfiction texts. These skills help support our curiosity by allowing Learners to better interact with the world of information around them.

Emerald Elk with Corrie and Luke

This month we continued to build our class culture by literally constructing physical classroom materials such as a birthday chart, a multiplication table, and a job assignment board. We also decorated our cubbies with photos that are significant to us (and used our ELA skills to write descriptions for them)! Finally, in keeping with our big idea for the beginning of this year, we have continued “zooming in” on our personal native species by choosing a different one each week to write nature journals about and discuss during morning meetings. 

In math, fifth grade began September by discussing and then computing numbers with place values from the thousandths to the millions. Our middle school Learners dove into investigating negative and positive integers. We then moved onto a review of statistics and multiplication strategies before learning new ones through games and activities. We then combined all of these skills to analyze our natural surroundings, with fifth grade gathering data to calculate the average size of poplar leaves, and sixth/seventh grade displaying this data with box-and-whisker plots on an integer number line. 

In ELA, we continued our study of plot structure by analyzing John Steinbeck’s story The Turtle, and then by writing our own short stories. Here, the Emeralds went above and beyond by carefully including each aspect of plot in their own stories, such as exposition, rising action, and climax. Many began to plan and pursue large-scale writing projects to work on for an extended period of time! To complement our writing and literary analysis skills, we practiced our spelling skills by solving word ladders, with fifth graders mastering spelling concepts like “the bossy ‘e’” and sixth/seventh graders creating their own versions of the puzzle. 

Also in September, the Emerald Elk helped determine the course of our academics for the year by participating in math and ELA pre-assessments through IXL. Although the testing format was designed to get more difficult as Learners took them, the Elk showed great determination and stamina. We look forward to seeing them continue with this fantastic attitude as we move into larger projects this October!

SEL with Janelle

September has been a month of creating and reflecting! The Yellow Mushrooms have been busy brainstorming all of the important details that are needed to get their calm spot up and running. Kindness and flexible thinking have been common themes that we introduced to create a strong foundation for this inquisitive flock of Learners. We are working hard exploring basic emotions, mindfulness, and self regulation through games of shadow feelings, feelings freeze, emotion charades, bat and moth, and eagle eye. We spent some time leaning into the elements and exploring Water Chicken Way to practice safety and to drop rainbows and clouds about rainy school days into the water. 

The Red Hamsters are determined to make their calm spot a reflection of them.  They’re serious about details and amazingly reflective in their ability to recognize how they will use it to support their learning and self regulation needs.  We’ve played the feelings island game in order to gel as a group and give space for all the feelings that pop up over the course of a day. Empathy, gratitude, and growing happiness/kindness have been the foundation for the Red Hamsters flock. They’re excited about creating a space of their own, AKA “the hamster haven,” including visuals for emotion check ins, growth mindset, a kindness daisy chain, and a kindness pond.  

The Silver Serpents have marveled at learning more about perspective and active listening skills through the exploration of optical illusions and small group brainstorming. They have eagerly created emotions collages in order to recognize, identify, reflect, navigate, and give space to the normalcy of all emotions. They have also spent considerable time reflecting on what makes them unique in their flock and community.

The Emerald Elk have embarked on exploring the topics of respect, active listening, perspective, and empathy. These are pivotal to their job as role models for the Yellow, Red, and Silver flocks to look up to. They’ve worked together in small groups to reflect and identify the individual qualities they bring to their flock through a puzzle making activity that highlighted their ability to think creatively and problem solve together. They are motivated and excited to work on writing group skits to further model several important qualities that serve as pillars of the GAP School community.  

Projects and Knowledge Seekers with Max and Ryan

September at GAP School is a time to explore all the resources the forest has produced. We have taken the opportunity to learn about foraging in the woods for resources such as autum oilve, acorns, hickory nuts, and black walnut. As the weeks passed, we took time to harvest A LOT of autumn olive which is now in the freezer and available for Learner projects such as fruit leather. As September drew to a close we started to observe a masting year from our Oak trees which means acorns are abundant. We are gathering acorns daily and freezing them to be processed later in the season into acorn flour.

Maker Days are now in full swing with all of our Learners dreaming up their own projects, creating a proposal and budget, and working through the process of creation and when necessary redesign and retest. This is a design process that we use year after year at GAP School so that our Learners become more comfortable with the idea of having to learn from mistakes to improve the end product. Maker Days are all about the process! Our Learners have been feeling ambitious as they bite off projects that involve sewing, baking, woodworking and more. We are always excited to see what they'll dream up next!