Newsletter: January 2025

As we transitioned back from the holiday break, both the students and I were excited to start new routines and get into the swing of things again! As such, January 2025 was filled with new—projects and in-class activities, field trips, and friends! In fact, we welcomed THREE new kiddos to our crew! From experimenting with Fluid Art to Miss Donnelly’s Daily Apple making its vendor debut at the Pacific Coast Academy’s Gather & Grow event, it was an exciting month for teacher and students alike! Here’s our recap of the month:

Monthly Highlights:

  • NEW CLASS ALERT — This month we officially (re)launched our Wednesday afternoon “Slice” class.. Created to intentionally incorporate hands-on STEM, Social Studies, and Art, it’s an all-ages (and sibling-focused!) class. And it’s a ton of fun! 🙌
  • Hawaii Fluid Art — Per another amazing parent recommendation, we headed to ‘Hawaii Fluid Art’ in Liberty Station to experiment with paint, canvas creations, and pouring techniques! Our students had no idea what to expect. . . and they were thrilled to see the end results! All of their projects were so unique and beautiful. It was fun to have so many parent chaperones there, too, as well as our ‘Student Chaperone,’ Austin (Miss Marisa’s son) as we headed to the field trip on MLK Jr. Day — a day off of school for all! 🎨
  • Gather & Grow — This was an event put on by Pacific Coast Academy, one of the local charter schools (and a school that Donnelly’s Daily Apple is a vendor for!). This was their big event of the new year, and we were able to take part as a vendor, sharing about our programs and why we do what we do!

“Gala” (Mondays + Wednesdays):

  • Phonics, Spelling & ELA (English & Language Arts): This month, we started TWO new activities: Winter Writing & Short-Vowel Reading Passages. For our ‘Winter Writing,’ students work on a sentence every morning, practicing formulating their own ideas with words from the word bank, using proper capitalization and punctuation, and re-reading to ensure their ideas make sense. For our ‘Short-Vowel Passages,’ the focus is repeated reading. Students track the CVC words together as a class, find them one-by-one in the story, and then go through a process of THREE readings (echo, whole-group, and individual). It’s amazing to see how quickly the students progress with the repetition!
  • Math & Reasoning: Almost all of our math activities this month were stations, meaning we had a lot of movement around the classroom to stay engaged! Students are paired with partner(s) that switch every session and are challenged to work as a team to figure out math problems: clocks, counting, addition/subtraction, reasoning, number sense, place value, and skip-counting! The students love stations because they get to have friendly competition and fun with math!
  • STEM/Social Studies: Coming back from break and still celebrating different holidays across the world (like Chinese New Year/Lunar New Year and MLK Jr. Day), our focus in January 2025 was learning about different holidays and why people celebrate them. We watched a short, informational video about MLK Jr.’s life, did some Lunar New Year coloring and math pages, and talked about when/where/why people celebrate different things in different areas of the world!

“Slice” (Mondays):

  • English & Language Arts: January 2025 marked the start of a new area of focus for our Monday “Slice” — spelling! Starting this month, we began our class with a pretest of words, followed by ‘building block’ activities to learn the letter patterns, and then sentence dictation (listening and writing the sentences you hear). If students advance to the second level, they also have the opportunity to do silly sentences or write a mini-story using their spelling words. We supplemented the spelling this month with writing units, focused on ‘feeling’ words and ‘naming’ words (aka: being specific with our word choice and adjectives).
  • Math & Reasoning: In math, we continued with shapes (both 2D and 3D), as well as 2 and 3-digit addition and subtraction with regrouping. To gamify our lessons, we did a lot of game-based and competition-based ‘stations’ and rotations.

“Honeycrisp” (Tuesdays):

  • English & Language Arts: Our two ELA units for this month were folk tales and narratives! Our students read several short stories, (notably “Cocoliso” — a favorite about a white alligator!), learned about the elements of folk tales/narrative stories, and then incorporated what they read and learned into stories of their own! From adopting a new puppy to getting a finger slammed in a car door, our students’ narrative stories were very different — and all interesting! Another thing we practiced this month was our ‘peer editing’ skills (and focusing on editing for specific areas).
  • Math & Reasoning: To make our multiplication more relevant, we did a MLK Jr. multiplication coloring sheet (which was so fun and displayed on our wall!). We also moved into ‘breaking down’ strategies for multiplication, for example using 5 x 7 (a 5’s fact) + plus another 7 to help us figure out 7 x 6!

“Slice” (Wednesdays):

  • Focus Area #1 – Birds: Our first STEM focus area for our new Wednesday class was birds! We learned about different kinds of birds, what they have/can do/need, what their body parts help them do, and much more! We did an experiment with different tools (tweezers, tongs, and pliers) as ‘beaks’ to understand how different designs/sizes help birds get their food! We also made homemade bird feeder treats (see the picture!), ‘nest’ crafts, and bird houses, too!
  • Focus Area #2 – Lunar New Year: For our Social Studies focus, we learned all about Lunar New Year/Chinese New Year (and the differences between the two). We explored the different years based on our birthdays, compared ourselves to our year ‘animals,’ and made our own fortune cookies! We also created a large-scale handprint dragon to celebrate one of the most common traditions of Lunar New Year!

“Slice” (Thursdays):

  • Morning “Slice”: This month we played a lot of math games/stations, including “Mitten Math,” where students worked with partners or small groups to figure out the 3-digit addition and subtraction equations, and “Dragon Addition” where students had to add three different numbers together in one equation! We also played a whole-group money game (“I Have Who Has”) and one of our students created a team name, “Team Makes No Cents,” to go with the activity, which was pretty creative and funny! For ELA, we continued with our Reading Comprehension, but added additional Lunar New Year reading passages, writing, and exploration.
  • Social Studies: We dove into learning about MLK Jr. this month, listening to his official speech and then taking time to dissect it, section by section, with summarizing notes and highlights. To help us understand the importance of the holiday, we also explored the idea of making a dream and worked on our own ‘Dream’ acrostic poems!

    To celebrate Lunar New Year, we looked at a detailed PowerPoint presentation about different customs and traditions. Then we compared/contrasted Lunar New Year to New Year’s Eve in the United States. Finally, we culminated this lesson with an art activity, making our own 2D lanterns!
  • STEM: In our STEM class this month, we did two experiments: ‘Falling Apples’ (where students dropped a full apple and half-apple at the same time to see what would the ground first – if any), and an ‘Air Resistance Lab’ (where students compared the falling speed of a crumpled ball of paper vs. a flat sheet of paper). What we learned in the first experiment is that gravity stays the same regardless of the items weight (half-apple or whole apple). For the second experiment, we learned that the flat sheet created more air resistance, therefore slowing it down. This is why airplanes, race cars, etc. have more streamlined designs (to catch less air!).
  • VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP: THE METEOR CRATER: Another fun activity we did this month was a virtual field trip based on my own, real-life travels to the Meteor Crater in Arizona! Inspired by my experience at the end of my cross-country road trip, I gathered all of the fun information from the Meteor Crater Museum, and compiled an interactive packet, video with question set, and art activities to have my students experience this, too! They had a blast pretending to ‘fly’ to Arizona, lead their own airplane across the crater, and learn about how it was formed! [See the recap video below!]
  • Havana Roasters Pastries — Random, but one of our student’s parents is a co-owner of this amazing coffee shop and they donated a full box of pastries to us! We got to have them on a special Thursday class! Yum! 😉

[Watch the virtual fieldtrip video! ↓]

[See our crazy kiddos try yummy pastries! ↓]

Other January 2025 Updates:

  • THREE FRIENDS! — We welcomed THREE amazing new students to our program this month! Vienna (“Gala” class), Shane (Monday & Thursday “Slice”), and Owen (Monday “Slice”)! Can’t wait to build new memories with these kiddos!

    PS: You can find more of our updates by bookmarking our Newsletter Page, connecting on our app (if you’re a current parent/guardian) or subscribing to our newsletter (below!).
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