November 2024 felt very quick, especially with Veteran’s Day, our trip to the California Farm & Garden, and our first holiday break of the school year for Thanksgiving. However, despite being short, it was a fun-filled month! Here’s our recap:
Monthly Highlights:
- California Farm & Garden Fieldtrip — This was such a unique field trip because it was recommended by one of our student’s parents (Thank you, Tiffany – Lily’s mom!). This farm is in the heart of the college district in La Jolla, and is super unique! Our students were able to explore the farm, touch and pick different plants, go on a scavenger hunt, learn about different growing processes and composting, AND they got to try some food too!
“Gala” (Mondays + Wednesdays):
- Phonics, Spelling & ELA (English & Language Arts): This month, we took a little break from our spelling packets (since having off for Veteran’s Day meant only two full weeks of spelling practice) and instead doubled-down on phonics, with CVC + CVCe words and also practicing reading books together as a class. Our big focus with reading was using our fingers/pencils to ‘track’ and keep our place while reading. We also had one student volunteer to read two of the stories aloud! Shout-out to Liam for being brave!
- Math & Reasoning: Something that we focused on a lot in November 2024 was ‘doubles’ and ‘near doubles’ addition. This means recognizing what the doubles facts are (ex: 5 + 5) and understanding that if we know 5+5=10, then we can easily determine that 5+6 would equal one more! This mathematical reasoning is important for building foundations of higher-level learning and our students really engaged with it, especially when we practiced with tactile items (like blocks, cubes, etc.) This month we also did a lot of color-by-number or color-by-math fact sheets, which are a fun way to bring in sensory and/or art to our math practice!
- STEM/Social Studies: Since we didn’t meet on Veteran’s Day, we did a mini-lesson on the importance of this holiday! We also did some fun activities related to Thanksgiving, not only sharing the importance but why people use this holiday to practice thankfulness. We made our own ‘Thankful Turkeys’ & a ‘Roll-A-Turkey’ art activity, where each dice role created a unique turkey design!
“Slice” (Mondays):
- English & Language Arts: November 2024 was short due to missing class for Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving Break, but we made the best of it by focusing on specific areas of our writing, including writing strong introduction and conclusion statements.
- Math & Reasoning: In math we worked on several mini-projects, for example a ‘Football Math’ activity where students had to race one another to complete math facts and find their matching pairs. This helped to build skills of fact matching, and understanding how we can use addition to solve subtraction (and vice versa). Another project was color-by-fact with both addition and subtraction math facts that included some of our ‘borrowing’ or ‘carrying’ facts that we’ve been working on!
“Honeycrisp” (Tuesdays):
- English & Language Arts: To ‘officially’ finish our Wild Robot unit, we completed an in-class project about character traits. The students had to go through a packet and highlight (and define!) different character traits that matched different characters. This helped to build greater understanding of not only the novel but of vocabulary as well! We also talked a lot about conflicts in the novel (internal vs. external) to lead into a final at-home project of creating a ‘Character Instagram’ profile!
- Math & Reasoning: A big push in November 2024 was understanding related facts, for example 2×3 and 6/3 (6 divided by 3) and how both of these are a part of a ‘fact family.’ This knowledge, combined with additional practice, was important for getting our students to the next level with multiplication and division. This month we also practiced our 2s, 5s, and 9s facts. For our 9s, we learned the hand trick, which was super fun and helpful!
“Slice” (Thursdays):
- Morning “Slice”: This month we continued our ‘ATW’ (Around The World) Math and Reading Comprehension, but we also did quite a few activities related to Thanksgiving, including ‘Turkey Math’ and turkey-related math stations! For writing, our big activity was “To Eat Or Not Eat” which was an opinion piece of persuasive writing focused on convincing your readers to eat (or not eat) turkey on Thanksgiving. Our students really loved this one and had fun making art, too (see the middle picture below).
- Social Studies: This month we focused primarily on the history of Thanksgiving, doing a mini-lesson on Pilgrims and the Wampanoag natives and what they wore, what they did, and how the interacted with one another. An important component of this study was helping our students understand that interactions between these groups weren’t always positive and weren’t always negative. Helping students see the ways the groups got along (aka: the historical ‘Thanksgiving feast’) but also that there were times of conflict, too, helps them to see history through different lenses.
- STEM: In November 2024, we did a fun gravity experiment, learning how far we could jump on the moon based on our jumping abilities on Earth! We concluded this lesson the last day before break, with students actively jumping, measuring their jumps, and doing advanced multiplication (with teacher help!) to figure out distance jumped on the moon!
Other November 2024 Updates:
- Thanksgiving Break! — November/Thanksgiving Break is the first holiday break of the academic year! Some of our students are traveling and some are staying local. It’s an exciting time to see family/friends, and to be thankful for all that we have! As a teacher of this amazing microschool, I’m so thankful for all our students and their families who trust me to teach their little ones. Although the time off (spent preparing, getting ready for next month, and sourcing new curriculum/activities hehe) is appreciated, I do miss my students!
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