Whew! April 2025 felt like it just flew by, didn’t it!? We started the month with a week of Spring Break! Many students and families traveled, spent time with family, or just enjoyed the wonderful weather. Outside of taking a little break, other highlights of April 2025 were our Tide Pooling Field Trip, our Spring-themed Pit & Children’s Lit book reading event, and our Tuesday class’s Earth Day park clean-up!
Monthly Highlights:
- Tides Field Trip — Our students were able to participate in an all-day tidepooling class this month, where they not only learned about the different creatures in our oceans but got to explore hands-on! It was amazing how many cool things they found!
- Earth Day Park Clean-Up — Earth Day fell on a Tuesday this year, so our Tuesday kiddos headed to the South Clairemont Park for a clean-up! The girls competed against the boys for who could pick up the most litter. . . and picked up a combined 525 pieces of trash (!!) on the road there and in the play areas! Although it was crazy to discover that much litter, it was also exciting to know we made a difference in our community.
“Gala” (Mondays + Wednesdays):
- Math & Reasoning: April 2025 was a great ‘scaling’ month for our Gala class, as the focus is pushing our students across all content areas to not only be challenged, but to work with different ‘buddies’ in more competition-based activities! We did a lot of math games this month, and in particular, ones where different ‘cards’ were hidden across the classroom and students had to search for them, solve them, and record their answers. This was a fun way to gamify some of our practice and encourage students to shift beyond their book-learning to practical application of facts!
- Phonics, Spelling & ELA (English & Language Arts): For ELA, we’ve been continuing with spelling, covering weeks dedicated to more challenging blends (like ‘ow’ in tow, ‘ow’ in cow, and oy/oi). Each class session we also write ‘silly sentences’ as a whole-group, where we use some of our spelling sentences in engaging mini-stories! This not only practices penmanship and spelling (of course!), but also creativity, word choice, sentence structure, conventions, and transfer from the board to paper!
Other April highlights in our Gala class are writing in our Spring Journals, practicing oral reading, and challenging our students to be brave and read independently in front of the class (which many do!). It’s been a great month!
“Slice” (Mondays):
- English & Language Arts: Upon returning from Spring Break, our Monday class has hit spelling hard, working to complete more independent activities, and practicing self-editing/self-checking to not only build spelling patterns but to encourage ownership and pride in their work! Outside of spelling, our students focused on creative writing this month, and weaving spelling words into their thematic writing.
- Math & Reasoning: In Math, we’ve been continuing with our ‘challenges,’ but brought in a bit more whole-group work, specifically with word problems!
In our Spring Problems activity, students read and listen carefully to problems that are shared on the board. They have to determine the equations (if we’re adding/subtracting etc.), write the equations correctly, solve on their white boards, and do a 3-2-1 reveal! Each equation is a competition for points, so it was fun to see them get serious about math and challenge one another.
“Honeycrisp” (Tuesdays):
- English & Language Arts: In our Tuesday class, April 2025 was all about persuasive writing! We spent the month working on a ‘Park Improvement Project,’ where the students had to do ‘field research’ at South Clairemont Park and determine areas of the playground that could be improved. They took notes, compiled their research, drafted letters, and worked on a multi-week editing series to create final letters for the SC Rec. Staff! After they finished their final drafts, we actually went to the park (on Earth Day!) and read the letters aloud to the staff. This was SUCH a memorable experience because the students could actually see the project come to fruition from start to finish. They were also challenged in their public speaking—and did amazing! We spent Earth Day at the park cleaning up, too, and collectively gathered over 500+ pieces of trash from our walk from school to the playground and back! What an amazing impact on the community!
- Math & Reasoning: In math, we moved through division with all of the facts (1-12) and really focused on strengthening our understanding of division through all of our strategies: multiplication as a tool, repeated subtraction, using 5s/2s/10s facts, and more. A highlight of this month was ending Unit 4 with an independent assessment that, while very challenging, showed that our students are doing SO WELL in their division skills! Hooray!
“Slice” (Wednesdays):
- Focus Area #1 – Circuits & Electromagnetism: Our Wednesday class has been learning about circuits and electromagnetism this month, and some of our activities have been drawing and labeling parts of simple circuit and magnets alike, experimenting with Snap Circuits (partner groups and whole-group), building a circuit-based machine, and creating a magnet flip toy!
- Focus Area #2 – Earth Day: To celebrate Earth Day, our students participated in engaging art activities! They drew pictures and wrote about how they could help the earth. They also shared what the earth and its resources mean to them and their everyday lives!
“Slice” (Thursdays):
- Morning “Slice”: A highlight of our morning session was beginning our Spring Station packets for math—working on different areas of math with different buddies—including fractions, part-to-whole, arrays/multiplication/repeated addition, telling time, money, and more! We’ve been busy *bunnies* this month! It’s crazy to think that there is just one month of school left!
- STEM: In April 2025, one of our Thursday class sessions was dedicated to our Tide Pooling Field Trip, which was a blast! Although we had overcast weather (which was a bummer at first), the day turned out to be perfect! We were in the shade while learning about different wildlife in the area and rules of tide pooling, and by the time we actually got into the water, the sun came out! Some highlights were finding the neon sea slug, some crabs, and even the carcass of a pelican (woah!).
Other April 2025 Updates:
- The April Earthquake! — This month we learned about earthquakes in our Thursday class—taking advantage of the unique opportunity of having a recent earthquake happen on April 14—and did a STEM building experiment to replicate what could happen in an earthquake.
- Mock ‘Oil Spill’ Activity — On Earth Day, we also did a ‘Mock Oil Spill’ activity, where students were challenged to clean up after an oil spill, trying to be as efficient and low-cost as possible. This gave them the opportunity to learn about the impact of oil spills on nature and how harmful this can be!
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