The last month of school rushed by (as last months often do!). One minute we were thinking about scheduling End-of-Year conferences. . . and the next it was time to enroll in summer camp! Crazy! Well, May 2025 was a whirlwind, but wonderful nonetheless. From heading to the SDDAC Animal Shelter to read to dogs, to celebrating the end of a great year with our Awards Ceremony & Pool Party, we had a lot of meaningful moments!
Monthly Highlights:
- Awards Ceremony — At the end of every year we host an all-student Awards Ceremony that welcomes family and friends alike to celebrate our students social, emotional, and academic achievements. As per tradition, each student receives a completion certificate AND an animal-themed award that highlights areas of their personality! With the animal-themed awards, the goal is to recognize each student for what makes him/her special (in and out of the classroom). Having the students come onto stage, accept their awards, and be recognized in front of family, friends, and peers alike was so special! It was just a great way to kick off the summer!
- Pool Party! — Which. . . speaking of summer, the EOY Pool Party is always a hit! Although the weather didn’t fully warm up until almost 4PM (!!), all the students jumped in the pool, played ultimate squirt gun wars, and jumped through every floating donut, shark, or flamingo possible! The Pool Party is a great way celebrate the year and provide a connection point for families before parting ways!
PS: Is it possible to add any more kids to the hot tub?!
“Gala” (Mondays + Wednesdays):
- Math & Reasoning: In our final month of the ‘Gala’ class, our big math focus was adding three numbers (with activities like the one in the picture below). The students had to match the pictures to the number cards and then add numbers in the series to get the final answer! We also did some engaging, full-group stations, too: ‘Blooming Numbers’ (where students had to find the missing parts in addition equations) and ‘Comparing’ (where students had to compare place values to figure out which number was bigger/smaller).
- Phonics, Spelling & ELA (English & Language Arts): For ELA, our continued focus this month was building fluency and oral reading skills through our short-vowel passages. The exciting thing, though, was that because we’ve been doing these passages for months, the students were ready (and willing!) to take turns reading. In fact, I ended up having to pick ‘spoons’ (like popsicle sticks with student names on them but in spoon format) because almost everyone volunteered to read first! Outside of reading, we also did a lot of ‘Silly Sentence’ writing and ‘Roll & Write’ activities with our spelling words to build automaticity with spelling patterns.
“Slice” (Mondays):
- English & Language Arts: Our focus this entire year has been building spelling, writing, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure skills, and May 2025 was no different. As we head towards the end of the year, the biggest goal is to build confidence around spelling, which in turn, translates to writing. Our students have really grown in their independent writing skills and are using the spelling patterns they’ve learned each week to inform (and self-check) their journaling activities on their own!
- Math & Reasoning: In Math, our Monday crew practiced with money this month, counting coins, purchasing ‘items,’ and comparing different values. We played money games, including a whole-group game where students had to count their coins and match their values with other group members in a card series that spread across the whole room! We also did a lot of work with arrays this month (as foundations for multiplication) and practiced this in a whiteboard game where students were challenged to compete against one another!
“Honeycrisp” (Tuesdays):
- English & Language Arts: Our big focuses this month were How-To Writing & Persuasive Writing (and how we could apply this to our everyday lives). As such, we worked on several writing pieces, including ‘How To Make An Item Drive’ (focused on the real-world application of gathering items/donations for our animal shelter field trip), and ‘Why You Should Support a Shelter’ (persuasive writing around advocacy that, of course, connected to our field trip as well!). Our students also made advertisement posters for the items drive, and then they created advertisements for the shelter dogs at the field trip, too! We also read several different short pieces, too, to inform our writing (how-to, persuasive, and realistic fiction).
- Math & Reasoning: In math, we completed our division and multiplication units (!!) and moved on to our final unit on area. We learned how length x width gives us the area of a space, and how this formula can both be applied in real-world contexts AND solved with the information we now know about multiplying and dividing! Students loved how ‘easy’ this unit was (now that they’ve done the hard work!) and it felt like a nice reward and transition to summer.
“Slice” (Wednesdays):
- Focus Area #1 – Cinco de Mayo Traditions: For Cinco de Mayo, we embarked on an art project that ended up taking several sessions. . . making homemade piñatas! This was a challenge, because we used paper mâché for the exterior, then painted, then created an outer layer with shredded paper, and then. . . ta da! Done at last! It was fun to make and learn about the culture and traditions, too!
- Focus Area #2 – Electricity & Electrical Components: This month we culminated our electricity unit by learning how circuits move, change, and turn on and off. We mapped out real-world examples of circuits in our notes and then drew our own. Finally, we modeled circuits on our Snap Circuit boards, tested them, and drew the different components in our journals! Our students are well on their way to becoming little electricians! 😜
“Slice” (Thursdays):
- Morning “Slice:” A highlight of our morning session (in math) was our final Spring Stations, which included ‘Place Value Butterflies’ (where students had to get butterflies to match the expanded form of numbers), ‘Symmetrical Shapes’ (where students were given half of a shape picture and had to draw the other, symmetrical side), and ‘Part-To-Whole’ (where students had to determine different fraction parts and label them).
- STEM: For STEM this month, we reviewed all of Newton’s Laws and mapped out what each of them looked like (definition, picture, and real-world example). We also built our own magnets this month with a battery and conductor (copper wire). It was neat to see how we could generate our own magnetic field! (This also lent itself to an awareness of science safety, as the copper wire generated a lot of heat!). Our final, mini-unit took a closer look at simple machines and their origins. We then connected this to other units, including our Leprechaun traps and other experiments and creations we’ve done/made this year.
- Social Studies: We finished our Social Studies class with our last two male tall tale figures, Davey Crockett and John Henry. It was fun to learn about the origins of these stories and determine what elements were embellished.
PPS: These pictures below are from the SDDAC Shelter Field Trip! ✨↓
Other May 2025 Updates:
- ‘Snapshot of My Year’! — As May 2025 was our last month of school, our classes completed different ‘snapshot’ activities to capture and memorialize special moments of the year. In our ‘Gala’ class, students made mini-books and colored each page with different picture memories. Some students wrote sentences, too, to accompany their pictures! Our Wednesday ‘Slice’ made mini, two-sided camera posters, and our Thursday ‘Slice’ made foldable cameras that opened to different writing sections about silly and special moments. Activities like this really help to circle back on everything we’ve done and celebrate!
- The Aerogarden Snack! — (Pictured below) After waiting months for Miss Marisa’s Aerogarden to grow tomatoes, the first ‘crop’ was ready for tasting! Our Thursday class got to take their first bites (and some students tried a tomato for the first time!). There’s nothing more satisfying than reaping the benefits of your own, home-grown snack!
Now we’re headed off to summer, camps, and the beach!
Thanks, everyone, for an amazing year and we’ll see you back in the fall!
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!).
