We ended our school year in mid-June, and had a little bit of time before we started our summer 2024 camps and tutoring sessions! It always feels like a whirlwind between June and August, but we’re so grateful for the kiddos we get to spend time with at summer camp (both new and old), the students who invest in 1:1 learning with us all summer, and the joy we experience reconnecting with students who take time off before the school year begins!
This summer was beautiful, warm, filled with joy, and too fast! Here is our recap:
June Highlights:
- Pit & Children’s Lit *Summer Series* —We kicked off June with the first Saturday of our children’s book reading “Summer Series” (with Styles!🐾), which was extra special because it was Father’s Day weekend! Quite a few of our students and their families joined us!
- June 2024 Summer Camp — We also kicked off our first week of summer camp this month! This year’s camp was extra special because it was the first year we hired outside vendors: Sticky Fingers Cooking, Taylor Booth (of Booth’s Butterfly Effect), Glen Lasker (of Momentum Gymnastics), and Brian Abella (of Jiu-Jitsu Foundation)! The vendors were amazing and really added that personal touch to camp. We’re so grateful!
July Highlights:
- Teachers Pay Teachers San Diego — During July, our founder Marisa Donnelly attended the TPT Conference in Downtown San Diego to continue her personal growth and development as a director and teacher! The sessions were packed with information about supporting students better, creating more engaging resources, and how to leverage different platforms to help your students (and other classrooms!) grow!
- Create & Play Summer Camp (July) — This month we also had our second week of camp! Some highlights were making a limeade drink (see the picture below), creating obstacle courses and ninja races, trying our jiu-jitsu moves on Coach Panda & Coach Emma, and playing water Twister!
- Pit & Children’s Lit — Our monthly book reading events got an upgrade this month as we created a custom sign to share about what we do and why! AND Styles posed for an advertisement picture, too! (Click here to see the BEST boy!🐾)
- Movie in the Park — We connected with one of our students, Sienna, and her dad at the Wall-E showing down the street from our school location! It was so fun to connect with a student outside of class and enjoy a movie together!
Create & Play Summer Camp!
August Highlights:
- Final Week Of Camp — We closed out summer camp with a final week of fun! Some of our favorite activities were SlipN’Sliding in the backyard, playing ‘Drip Drip Splash’ with reusable water balloons, bouncing on our giant balls (see above!), relay races, cooking days (we made empanadas, strawberry tarts, and much more!), creating two-layer art (a background setting with a window opening to it!), and making our own comics!
- Back-to-School Pool Party — This month we started getting ready for the 2024-2025 school year! How exciting! To kick things off, we had our “Back-to-School Pool Party,” where students and families get together (potluck style) to meet, swim, and play!
- First Week Of School — And finally. . . we welcomed FIVE new students and TEN returning students for our first week of school! Although the summer went by so fast, we were SO excited to see our students and get to launch our new academic year.
Other August Updates:
- “Gala” (MW Mornings) — We started our year with self-portraits (which are now hanging on our classroom wall!), and a bunch of get-to-know you activities to learn about each other (considering 4 of our 6 students are new this year)!
ELA: We dove into our new spelling units this month, which include a weekly packet where we break down sound-syllable patterns through creative activities (writing with gel pens, crosswords, filling in missing letters, and more!). This month we did scratch art letter-writing and shaving cream spelling words, too! And, each day we have a new read-aloud book featuring a fun, related topic or story (ex: first day, painting, animals, and more).
Math: We started our first math unit, which is all about parts-whole, addends, missing numbers, and basic adding. We also practiced math through fun games and ‘stations’ where students rotate and do different activities while moving around the classroom.
STEM: We also started a mini-unit on animals and their habitats, including a collage where we cut magazine clippings to create mini ‘stories’ about our selected animals. - “Honeycrisp” (Tuesdays) — Our Tuesday crew started the school year with a ‘scavenger hunt’ that helped students learn about each other and what we were all up to during the summer! We created portraits and got our new planners to help with organization, too.
ELA: We started our first activities for our upcoming book, The Wild Robot, which we will officially begin reading in September! This included a non-fiction reading about robots in our day-to-day life to set the stage for our story. We also worked on some spelling review, some summer writing prompts, and got our “Writer’s Notebooks” which will be our ‘scrapbooks’ of writing throughout the year.
Math: In math, we jumped into multiplication, focusing first on understanding groups and factors, and relating multiplication to repeated addition/skip-counting! - “Slice” (Thursdays) — Our Thursday morning crew started our Reading Comprehension (where we read passages, use analyzation strategies, and answer questions together to boost reading skills!), followed by our ‘Around the World Math’ (where each student takes a turn answering an above-level question), followed by stations and creative activities.
Our Thursday afternoon crew began a unit on force/motion, starting with a short clip from Miss Frizzle’s Magic School Bus and note-taking in our new STEM & Social Studies sticker-journals! We also learned about push/pull, balance, and are headed into a more in-depth learning about types of forces and movement in relation to everyday things. . . like tug-of war! (Stay tuned for more!)
Overall, this school year is off to a great start and we couldn’t be more excited!
PS: We’re headed back to our ‘regularly scheduled programming’ with our newsletters!
Which means that if you’re a current parent/guardian/family, you can find all of our school-related updates by getting on the Donnelly Daily Apple app (Android version here), bookmarking our Microschool Page or Parent Page, and subscribing (below!).
