After a whole bunch of “see you next year!” jokes, we welcomed students back for January 2024! This was a month filled with NYE-themed activities, poetry and writing projects, erosion and weathering experiments, MLK studies, and Presidential election book reading/studying! We came back to class with a bang!
Monthly Highlights:
- New Years Traditions – The start of a new year comes with new expectations. We took some time this month to talk about what resolutions really are, and how we can create resolutions (or goals/focus areas) for our classroom, too!
- MLK Day – This holiday is always a hit in our classroom because learning about the life and legacy of MLK is so inspiring! This year, we did activities relating to MLK’s life, created symbols to represent him, and even did some of our own dream writing to reflect on what his impact means for our lives today (both in and out of school).
- January Networking & Community Connection – Miss Marisa attended a “:Speed Networking Event” in Point Loma this month to share all that Donnelly’s Daily Apple is about! She connected with amazing people and hosted a booth to share about homeschooling, alternative education, and different programs we offer! It was a great way to meet new families and look for students to join in the new year (and beyond!)
Mondays:
- English & Language Arts: We came back to class super excited about New Years and different traditions we did (or want to do in the future). As such, a lot of the early writing this month was NYE-themed or about resolutions. But, we also worked on a three-part writing project (drafting, revising, publishing) with a fiction story about our ‘Crazy Neighborhood.’ There was a selection of ideas we had to include, as well as strong nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Upon completion, we read these aloud and laminated them for classroom display!
- Math & Reasoning: A big focus of January 2024 was perfecting our ‘standard algorithm’ skills (2-digit by 2-digit math vertically and traditionally). This was a lot of practice through games and friendly competitions. We also worked on two smaller units in clocks and money, too!
- Squishies: For a fun activity this month, we made Elmer’s Squishies!
Tuesdays:
- English & Language Arts: This month we continued our deep-dive into poetry (elements of poetry, reading and analyzing poetry, and using components of poetry to write our own)! We also started to learn about opinion writing (persuasive writing) with an introduction through reading opinion pieces in our books and handouts. Another thing we worked on this month was our listening skills! In this Monster Drawing Activity (see left), students would have to read the description cards and give clues to the other person (who would try to draw the monster). It was fun to listen carefully and discover what each partner drew!
- Math & Reasoning: For January 2024 math, we finished up our money and time units, culminating with some fun class rotational stations.
Wednesdays & Thursdays:
- Foundations: This month we learned about acrostic poems (where the first letter of the word creates the first word in each line) and made our own! We did a lot of “roll and add” activities, color by number through solving addition/subtraction through 20, and phonics units, specifically focused on ‘ch,’ ‘sh,’ ‘sch,’ and ‘wh’ sounds and our “Bossy R’s.”
- Social Studies: In Social Studies this month, we not only talked about MLK but in general what kindness and fairness look like (in the classroom and the real world). We also started talking about government and how people can have different perspectives on issues. One of our favorite activities to practice this was where we had to “travel” to the side of the classroom that we agreed with more. Through that movement-based activity, we learned how tricky it is to have hard and fast ‘rules’ for your political perspectives and why voting matters.
- STEM: In STEM this month, we had a ton of fun learning about weathering and erosion, specifically with our hands-on experiment stations. In these stations, students created ‘mock’ examples of nature (waves over sand, wind, high tides pulling sand from the ‘beach,’ etc.) and they had to identify what was happening and why.
Other January 2024 Updates:
- Grace For President: One of our all-time favorite books so far has been Grace for President, which is a book about a girl named Grace who enters into a classroom presidential election vs. one of her classmates! She campaigns against this classmate (who doesn’t really have a great strategy, by the way) and because of the number of electoral votes for each state (represented by different students in the classroom), she ends up winning the majority vote! The students learned a lot through this reading and subsequent activities, but they also had so much fun reading, listening, and creating their own book pages!
- PS: You can find more of our updates by bookmarking our Microschool Page, connecting with our Parent Page, and subscribing to our newsletter (below!).
