August 2026 at GAP School!

Orange Monarchs with Emily

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The first few weeks of school have been magical and transformative as we've bonded and built our class community!

As a flock, we exercised collaboration as we generated flock name ideas. After voting for the Orange Monarchs, we practiced creativity and came up with a cheer to show our pride! Here we learned and reviewed the lifecycle of a butterfly and incorporated it into our song. While transitioning back to school, we have been building our understanding of whole body listening and active participation through visuals. When going from one place to another, we have practiced the routine of physical transitions by having “ready” spaces. Campfire questions have been a class favorite during transitions and have been a fun way to get to know each other.

Learners have been gaining the understanding of the flow of the day and have slowly been introduced to all school exploration. Learners have been working hard on collaboration by building common language. Here we are deepening our understanding of community as we coming up with our own class expectations by sorting out visuals and making signs. We have explored the routine of rotation stations during brain blast. Here, we are expanding our concepts of sharing, taking turns, and when to stop something and clean up.

As we move forward into the year, we will continue to deepen our exploration, build upon our functioning skills, create, and collaborate as a community while we learn new things!

Silver Sea Lions with Furn, Elijah, and Sapna

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We have had such a fabulous start to our school year! The beginning of the year is a crucial time to build norms and create our class culture as a unit. With a larger class full of returning and new GAP School learners, we are being really intentional about this time. After group challenges, get to know you games and activities, introducing ourselves to classroom spaces, and expectations the first week, we dove a little deeper - What do we want the Silver class to be known for? Adventurous, Respectful, Collaborative, Creative… we came up with so many awesome qualities that our class will embody this year! Now that we had a vision for our in mind, we started thinking of what we want our flockmates, educators, and school to be like. Using all of this information, Silvers are coming up with a class statement to share with the school that embodies who we are and who we want to be! We’ve also been introducing ourselves to math routines, doing thinking tasks, and codesigning our math zone in the pavilion.

What an amazing first few weeks of school the Silver Sea Lions have had together in ELA. Here’s a look into ELA so far. For our Brain Blast time, the Silvers split into three small-group rotations. We start class with a calming time to listen and breathe. Transitions can be hard. To support our learners, we use a singing bowl to open ELA. We chime it three times, and after each chime, take a deep, relaxing breath and recite part of our mantra: “I am calm. I am safe. I am ready.” We can quickly feel our nervous energy dissipate and our attention tune in! 

The Silvers spent the first week of school on expectations in ELA. First, we brainstormed how we want our time together to FEEL. What emotions do we want to feel during ELA? Learners generated ideas on sticky notes and placed them on a collaborative anchor chart. For example, each group wanted to feel calm, safe, happy, respected, and confident. Next, we brainstormed what we need to DO to feel that way. This step was crucial. After we made a clear picture of how we want to feel in class, we brainstormed actions to make sure we feel the way we want. Every action learners came up with are the expectations we hold each other accountable to at GAP School. Whether they were familiar with the expectations already, or came in with fresh perspectives, learners showed an excellent understanding of what we need to do during class to make it a calm, safe, happy, respectable, and confident experience. Finally, we discussed what occasions are IN our control versus OUT of our control. Framing behaviors and circumstances this way helps learners identify and focus on what they CAN control and what they can DO to support how they want to FEEL. We made a collaborative visual that comes out during ELA to remind us of our goals and expectations.

We’ve also started our beginning of year assessments in ELA. Before assessing, we discussed in our learning groups how assessments work and why we do them. Transparency helps kids feel seen, included, and safe. We explain that assessments are tools for educators to figure out what we already know, what we are still learning, and what we don’t know yet, which helps us decide what to review and what to spend more time on. Learners tend to respond with a breath of relief—we aren’t measuring how “good” or “bad” they are at a subject. We simply want to know what their individual next steps look like! This first round of assessments has two parts. First, this looks like 1-on-1 time with a short reading passage, a list of real words, nonsense words, and tricky words, as well as a pair of short sentences to read. This section helps assess reading accuracy, fluency, and phonemic awareness. The next section looks like a list of spelling words administered to the whole class. This section helps assess overall phonemic awareness without spelling techniques and assistance. Data from these two sections will help pinpoint where we start the year in ELA for each learning group. If you are interested in scheduling a parent teacher conference to discuss where your learner is starting the year with their literacy skills, please e-mail Melissa!

Once we finish assessments, we’ll be diving into our curriculum. To support our ELA curriculum goals this year, the Silvers will be using Interactive Notebooks. Their notebooks will serve as a place to record, reference, and practice the skills they develop. We can’t wait to make our own mini-books together as we grow this year.

In science, we have been focusing on foraging. We collected pokeweed berries to make paint and autumn olives to make jam. We read The Honorable Harvest before we foraged, which taught us to introduce ourselves, ask permission, listen for an answer, and receive gifts from nature with gratitude. The Silver Sea Lions have been doing a great job foraging in a kind and respectful way. Their nature connection has been shining through. We learned about the history of the autumn olives, the reasons they outcompete native plants, and how we can help reduce the spread of invasive plants. We have also been learning about the five senses and how they allow us to move through, interact with, and understand the world around us. We will continue bringing our senses into our learning. Our sense of taste will get a treat soon with our autumn olive jam!

Emerald Eddys with Max and Melissa

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Greetings, GAP School Community, from the Emerald Eddys!

Our first few weeks of school in August have flown by! Our eldest flock has quickly come together as a great team, and we are already looking forward to all that we will accomplish together this year.

Our first three days of school, along with the following week, were dedicated to establishing the community that we want to see throughout the year. To achieve this goal, we took a cue from the GAP School Educators and had our very own "professional development" week. We called it Flock Development Week.

Flock Development Week began with an early hike up Kinsers mountain, where we had the opportunity to bond as a group and think about not only how we want to feel at school, but what we need to DO to feel that way. This mountaintop conversation became the foundation for establishing our shared Emerald Flock expectations for the year. From there, we spent time identifying how we want to care for our Learning Space, established stewardship tasks to begin each day, created a flock music playlist, tackled some brain-melting math challenges, and so much more!

By far, the best part of Flock Development Week was giving each Learner the opportunity to lead a workshop for their peers. The workshops were designed to accomplish a goal for our Flock (such as decorating our binders and cubbies) or to teach a skill we could use together, such as lighting a fire with ferro rods or learning to play chess. Each Learner had to plan their workshop, brainstorm ways to engage an audience, and ultimately present their ideas or skills to the group. It was a wonderful example of the kind of leadership and ownership we will be practicing throughout the year in Emerald.

This past week, we shifted our focus toward academics while continuing to build on the strong community we established. In math, we reviewed key concepts and identified areas that feel solid as well as those that we are still working on. In ELA, we explored the writing process and editing while continuing our nonfiction text analysis through the book What the Fact.

The Emeralds have officially kicked off our GAP School Big Idea, “It Takes a Village.” We began by adopting a tree, which will serve as the starting point for our inquiry into trees, ecosystems, and the interconnectedness of the natural world.

September will bring even more opportunities to learn under the trees, along with IXL math assessments, our first math inquiry, and continued exploration of the writing process. We are off to a wonderful start, and are excited to see where this Flock takes us!

SEL with Janelle

We are slowly rolling into our SEL skills, as the primary focus for all flocks has been on building class culture and teamwork. SEL has been following that thread.  

Orange learners are having mini conversations about their feelings. Our friend, Scribble spot, has made an appearance to make sure everyone knows that all feelings are normal and sometimes (especially in new places and with new people) all those feelings are scribbled up. We have also been taking time to practice and reflect on mindfulness as well as starting to think about a calm or peaceful spot and exploring that through sit spots and yoga. Stay tuned as we keep learning about all the different emotions individually and keep your eyes peeled for helpful tools in your Orange Learner's backpack that can help you talk about the spots at home.

Silver Learners have been working on contributing to their classroom space, thinking through what their regulation station will look like, where it will be, what tools will be helpful to have in it, and what the expectations should be for them to feel best supported. Please feel free to reach out with questions or clarification on anything that may pop up at home for your Learners. 

The Emerald Eddy's will kick off SEL in September, we are looking forward to co-creating a regulation station that feels supportive to all of our learners.