February 2025 was filled with fun moments and memories! The biggest highlight was our Valentine’s Day Treat Exchange & Movie Party where students brought in treats and items to share with one another. It was fun to see everyone connect from class-to-class, and for those who don’t always see one another to learn names and faces!
We also did some fun crafts, too, like making dinosaur ‘treat’ boxes and Valentine owls! Here’s our recap of the month:
Monthly Highlights:
- Black History Month — With February 2025 being Black History Month, we dabbled into a cross-curricular Influential Black Americans project with our Tuesday & Thursday classes! Our Tuesday students were assigned an individual of their choice and independently researched him/her, recorded their facts, organized information, and shared their findings with the class! This was a project that encompassed research, summarizing, and public speaking—and it was fun, too!
Our Thursday class worked on our ‘Pendant Project’ (see more below!) where students read, took notes, recorded information, and made art for our classroom walls!
“Gala” (Mondays + Wednesdays):
- Phonics, Spelling & ELA (English & Language Arts): This month we started “Magic Writing,” where students wrote their spelling words with ‘invisible ink’ (white crayon) and colored over the words with marker to make them appear! This was exciting (and tricky to make sure you could write the words correctly!) but the students loved it. We also started making word searches: writing the words into our templates and then filling in random letters to make it tricky! Classmates tried each other’s creations, and then a copy went home for parents/guardians to try, too! For reading, our focus in February 2025 was strengthening our confidence, fluency, and oral reading skills through short vowel repetitive reading passages!
- Math & Reasoning: This month our biggest focus was on building practical skills with our calendar: learning how to read the calendar, mark dates, follow days of the week, etc. In math, we practiced a lot of place value, looking at 10 more/10 less and using stations to build this skill. We also did a math assessment to measure where students were at in their most recent unit!
“Slice” (Mondays):
- English & Language Arts: In our Monday class, our biggest area of focus for ELA is always spelling—breaking down spelling patterns, practicing spelling-based activities, and working on our writing skills with our words! In addition to spelling, we practiced subject-verb agreement, strengthening sentence structure, and understanding parts of a sentence.
- Math & Reasoning: In Math, we started our “Challenge Packets” where students worked with ‘buddies’ to complete (and compete!) in different areas: place value, 2 & 3-digit addition/subtraction, shapes, arrays, comparing numbers, and more! We also did some independent work, too, to help figure out areas of strength/need within our core group, which is always super helpful for more targeted practice!
“Honeycrisp” (Tuesdays):
- English & Language Arts: In our Tuesday class, we started our ELA unit on Informational Text! Our big areas of focus within this unit (outside of reading, of course!) were writing and editing—specifically developing a strong introduction to our writing, practicing with dialogue, developing conjunctions, and strengthening subject-predicate agreement in our sentences. We also did a mini-unit on comparative and superlative adjectives, helping students understand comparisons and how they can use different word forms correctly when comparing.
- Math & Reasoning: For math, our big focus was multiples and using our understanding of repeated addition to help with knowing multiples of different numbers when multiplying! We also focused on some of our ‘harder’ multiplication facts: 6, 7, and 8.
“Slice” (Wednesdays):
- Focus Area #1 – Birds (Part 2): In our Wednesday class, our sessions were varied and fun! For our ‘Birds’ unit, we did a mini ‘Pick A Bird’ project where students learned about different types of birds and what made them unique! We also did a little STEM lab where we experimented with what it would be like to have different beaks (to simulate the different beaks of birds in the wild). We also completed a whole-group, hands-on Kiwi Create to make our own bird (with moveable wings!).
- Focus Area #2 – Plant Life Cycle: Our other class highlight was the unit on plants, seeds, and the plant cycle! For our Plant Life Cycle unit, we made our own paper plants, painted flower pots, and crated colorful ‘seed cycle’ books!
“Slice” (Thursdays):
- Morning “Slice”: This month, our morning crew completed many math stations, and continued with our Reading Comprehension and “Around the World” group math! A great month filled with lots of learning and fun!
- STEM: Another highlight of our Thursday session was our STEM unit on air resistance, air pressure, and Newton’s Third Law of Motion! We experimented with air resistance in a hands-on lab this month, too! In this lab, students designed and tested their own paper airplanes! Congratulations to Liam, whose airplane flew the furthest distance of 18.5 feet! Wow!
- Social Studies: For Black History Month, our Thursday class embarked on a several-week-series of creating different pendants of Influential Black Americans! This was so fun, because different groups of students were assigned to different people! So, not only did the students get to explore, read, highlight, and create a summarized pendant of facts for the classroom wall, but they also presented their findings to the class and learned about one another’s people, too! It was an interactive and informative way to learn about many people within a weekly class session!
Other February 2025 Updates:
- VALENTINE’S DAY EXCHANGE! — There’s nothing more fun than gathering items for classmates, making/designing cards or a box, or giving your friends all your items! Our V-Day party was a blast, especially because students got to see friends from other classes AND watch a movie, too! It was a special day!
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