This year is flying by! We welcomed November 2023 on the heels of our Halloween & Día de los Muertos celebrations. This month was all about thankfulness, learning about San Diego’s rich history and the Kumeyaay tribe, and even heading on an outdoor adventure/hiking fieldtrip to Mission Trails Regional Park!
Monthly Highlights:
- Thanksgiving – Having time to slow down and reflect on what we’re thankful for is so important! Although we didn’t have a Thanksgiving ‘party’ during our class time, we did a lot of thankful activities that helped us remember the most important part of this season!
- Mission Trails Regional Park Fieldtrip – In conjunction with our unit on the Kumeyaay tribe and the history of San Diego, we explored the trails where the Kumeyaay spent most of their time! We got to walk different areas, learn about nature and how the tribe used the land for their food, and we even even got to have an outdoor lunch!
- Acorn Milling – One of the coolest parts of our fieldtrip was getting to actually practice milling acorns just like the Kumeyaay tribe did! We learned that they used stones to mill the acorn (break it down into a powder) to create “shawii,” an acorn mush!
Mondays:
- English & Language Arts: November 2023 was focused on “Informational Text.” Students read different types of informational text, defined the elements of this type of literature, and even took notes in the “Writer’s Notebook” about facts vs. opinions! We practiced writing our own informative sentences, and had fun with Thanksgiving and ‘thankful’ writing, too!
- Math & Reasoning: A big focus in our Monday group this month was expanding our knowledge of skip-counting! We focused on counting with different numbers (2s, 3’s, 4’s, 5’s, 10’s) and more specifically, starting at different numbers rather than 0. This is a foundational skill for multiplication! We also focused on using our skip-counting to improve our “10 more, 10 less” reasoning, which can still be very tricky! This was practiced with a combination of math stations, paper-pencil work, and games!
Tuesdays:
- English & Language Arts: In our Tuesday sessions, we worked on mini ‘book reports’ about some of the content we read! We also took a deep dive into the differences between fiction and non-fiction, taking notes in our “Writer’s Notebook” and comparing / contrasting. To help build understanding, we even created mini-stories of the two genres and shared them aloud!
- Math & Reasoning: In Math, we took a look at different adding and subtracting strategies, including visual models to help us understand the ‘why’ behind different methods. Rather than just looking at traditional 2-digit problem-solving, we explored other ways of ‘seeing’ the math to reinforce our understanding.
Wednesdays & Thursdays:
- Foundations: This month we prioritized Thanksgiving-themed stations (for both ELA and math). We also did a lot of work with long vowel sounds, using scavenger hunts to challenge and ‘seek’ out specific sound patterns. For math, we also focused on graphing and reading data in order to set up graphs, which was a lot of fun!
- Social Studies & STEM: In Social Studies this month, we finished our reading of Hooper Finds A Family and did a culminating art project using magazine clippings to summarize the main idea and ‘mood’ (feeling) at the beginning, middle, and end of the book. We then connected the book to our current STEM unit on landforms, urban/suburban/rural settings, and bodies of water, comparing our findings to the geographical location(s) and setting(s) in our book! Other things we worked on this month was a deep-dive into San Diego’s history (people and places) and specifically the indigenous tribes. We studied the Kumeyaay tribe in depth, discovering not only what they believed and how they lived, but how their customs, traditions, and stories are still alive and well today!
Other November 2023 Updates:
- Another STEM unit we had this month was on disasters, specifically earthquakes, avalanches, and landslides! Our students played “reporter,” and after researching their specific disaster(s), got dressed in their ‘newscaster outfits’ and recorded mini-videos of their findings! It was a lot of fun, and the public speaking component of talking on camera gave them an extra exciting way to connect to their learning!
- PS: You can find more of our updates by bookmarking our Microschool Page, connecting with our Parent Page, and subscribing to our newsletter (below!).
