Our 2023-2024 academic year is in full swing! Hooray! From our founder’s wedding (which some students were able to attend!) to starting a new year with new friends, schedules, and classes, September 2023 had so much excitement to offer!
Monthly Highlights:
- New Playground Equipment – Our schoolyard got a facelift this summer! We added a climbing structure to our backyard for some proprioceptive feedback and ‘brain break’ activities, as well as some turf to keep high-traffic areas from getting too muddy during wet/rainy seasons.
- Back-To-School Pool Party – We celebrated our transition from summer to school with a late August pool party for committed students and their families! Splashing, hot-tubbing, snacking, and connecting with families (new and returning) was so much fun!
- Miss Marisa’s Wedding – Miss Marisa got married! This was a long-awaited, special moment for not only her but for the whole class! In fact, all of the students had helped create little signs that were displayed for the reception. [You can see the whole behind-the-scenes video about this on our Instagram page!]
Mondays:
- English & Language Arts: This month we focused on refreshing skills from the summer, including grammar, punctuation, and short/long vowel sound patterns. Our students started writing in their notebooks about nouns, verbs, adjectives and made ‘silly sentences’ together, as well as Mad Libs. We also got our new ELA books, ‘My View,’ where we started reading and talking about setting & characters!
- Math & Reasoning: After assessing the basics, we jumped into advanced adding/subtracting and place value, specifically understanding place value blocks and how we can use them to add/subtract larger numbers. We also refreshed our knowledge of number lines, number bonds, and started practicing in our new Envision Math book!
Tuesdays:
- English & Language Arts: We started with a grammar refresher, focusing on important elements of reading and writing. We also talked about finding a ‘just right’ book to read and how to fill out reading logs. This month was also looking at topic and supporting details in writing, so we did an in’-class project about shoes, followed by a take-home homework project on describing someone’s shoe! In our book, ‘My View,’ we read our first story, too!
- Math & Reasoning: September was all about getting students prepared for 2-3rd grade skills, so we jumped into hundreds, tens, and ones place value practice, as well as ‘carrying’ and ‘regrouping’ for two-digit addition and subtraction.
Wednesdays & Thursdays:
- Foundations: We started our first month of school with creating our own Vowel Circles & Math Strategy sheets! These were helpful to remind us of our sounds/syllables as well as tools we have in our ‘toolboxes.’ We’ve worked on individual practice (Phonics & grade-specific books) as well as group lessons on short and long vowels, graphing, greater/less than, and addition/subtraction!
- Social Studies & STEM: This month we talked about September 11th & Patriot Day and made a collaborative part piece commemorating the events and their impact on our society. We started a unit on weather, specifically hurricanes, and started reading a novel about a dog (Jimmy/Hooper) who lost his family during Hurricane Katrina to piggy-back off of our studying of historical hurricanes and events in our nation’s past. We also practiced the “I see, I wonder” strategy to think deeper about concepts in Social Studies. In STEM, we’ve been working on states of matter/matter changes and states of matter. We did an Ice Cube Race and and even built our own dam to connect between our reading in Social Studies with hands-on creation with nature!
Other September 2023 Updates:
- You can find more of our updates by bookmarking our Microschool Page, connecting with our Parent Page, and subscribing to our newsletter (below!).
- If you’d like to see more updates about Miss Marisa’s wedding, you can watch this adorable behind-the-scenes Reel about what the students made!
