August at GAP School!

Yellow Mushrooms with Emily and Virginia

In the last two weeks, the Yellow Mushrooms have been hard at work as they build their community, practice teamwork, and establish routines. Each morning, the Yellow Mushrooms have been giving back to school by collecting sticks to build fires during our colder months and relocating gravel back into our learning space, the Campfire Circle. The Learners have chosen a collection of books to explore during DEAR time. They have been partnering up with Educators and peers as they flip through pages, observe illustrations or photographs, and identify letters and words. During morning meetings, we greet one another by reading a message on the white board, singing days of the week and months of the year songs, and reading sentences that tell us what today is, what day yesterday was, and what tomorrow will be. We then turn our attention to our class calendar to visually see the days of the week in the month of August. We are weather forecasters as we decide on what the weather is like & we warm up our brains while participating in ELA and math activities.

In ELA, we have introduced ELA Buddy Bunny, our reading and writing bunny friend who chooses to learn with an active listener each day. We have been exploring the letter Mm through daily messages, play-dough letter formation, and letter formation while using lined paper. Together we have started a book study on the Zoey and Sassafras series! So far, we have discussed front cover, back cover, author, illustrator, and characters within the story. We have also practiced nature journaling by exploring the Village!

In math, we are beginning to explore shapes, both 2D and 3D, and how we can manipulate them to make other shapes. We used cardboard boxes, tubes, and Magna-tiles to make different structures. We built some very creative structures, like a car, a house, and even pants! We also used tangrams to manipulate shapes into different formations and to solve puzzles.

It has been a fantastic two weeks together!

Red Hamsters with Lauren 

The Red Hamsters explored the idea of community and what that means to us both here at GAP School and in our flock. We helped our GAP School community by helping to reconstruct our fire pit where we gather as a whole school, weeding, and replacing gravel in our community meeting area. We read several books about kindness and consideration of others. Some of our favorite books were Share Some Kindness, Bring Some Light by Apryl Stott, and Have You Filled a Bucket Today by Carol McCloud. These books inspired us to make a kindness bucket of our own and add notes of appreciation for one another’s daily kindnesses. During our discussion of what community means to us, some of the things that arose included the feeling of being included and belonging, being kind to each other, having fun together, and doing hard things while knowing others will help if needed. The learners worked to create handmade signs with reminders of these elements of community and our expectations for our group as we move forward together in our school year. The Red Hamsters worked together to make the outdoor classroom space their own by adding areas for gross motor activities when they need to move their bodies while still being involved with our activities, designing a quiet area to retreat to if a break is needed, and rearranging our stumps and tables into the best locations in our space to beat the heat and escape the direct sun in the later hours of the day! 

In ELA we have been talking about the value of words and how they give us the ability to communicate clearly. We read The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds to inspire our collection of words for this year. We began to collect words from our DEAR books and are increasingly on the lookout for fabulously descriptive and fun words from our environment in day to day life! We have a Word Wall that we’ve begun and visit each day during our morning meeting. In handwriting we have discussed some of the basics that we want to employ when forming uppercase and lowercase letters. The learners recently began their practice with both the uppercase and lowercase letter A. We highlighted how writing is an art and the more we practice the better we become, aspiring to artistic forms like calligraphy in our future. We focused our word collection on words that begin with the letter A and came up with many additions, like aerodynamic and acrobatics. Our read aloud book of the moment is Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell.

In Mathematics we’ve done some review of the same concepts from last year and explored a variety of ways to visualize math. We’ve also played math fact games involving sums and differences. 

In Science we’ve been talking a lot about what it means to be a good observer and how detailed observation involve thoughtfully paying attention to what we’re looking at. We’ve really honed in on this concept in our nature journaling and in a surprise project that the students have begun working on. They have had a handful of sessions practicing their illustration skills using The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws. The learners have tested out different areas for their sit spots that we’ll be revisiting throughout this year. Sit spots have a profound way of drawing people into the phenology with seasonal changes and also support grounding and mindfulness practice. In a surprise adventure with Rachel we were able to explore Water Chicken Way with nets and go on a hunt for macroinvertebrates! We caught crayfish, a hellgrammite, a salamander, and more! In our forest adventures, the Red Hamsters have found frogs, many bird species, mushrooms, and plants. As we’ve discovered some ‘new-to-us’ species, we’ve taken time to identify what it is that we’ve found in our “Eureka” moments. We’ve also held many discussions around how we can describe a place, based upon descriptors that are beyond names for the place, using the specific species that surround us. These conversations were inspired by the book Where Are You From? By Jaime Kim, and the stories a girl’s grandfather tells her about where she’s from based upon the grasses, landscape, animals, and bodies of water that they experienced as a family over many years. We’ve been talking about what a description of GAP School would be through the lens of the flora and fauna as the descriptors. If we have to give someone directions to where we are here at GAP School without saying “Green Adventure Project School” or using street names, could they find this special place?

In Social Science we’ve been learning about China and the Great Wall; reasons it was built and many interesting facts and stories about it. We also learned a bit about a pirate’s life and explored some of the reasons that people become pirates, both in China and elsewhere. We’ve also been looking at maps of Mount Everest while learning the stories of the people who have attempted the ascent and about the timeline for some of the first successful treks up that epic mountain.

Silver Serpents with Furn and Elijah

We are so excited to be starting off the year in our new flock, the Silver Serpents! To get back into the swing of things, the Silvers and their Educators have been working hard to establish classroom norms, routines, and expectations. We have reviewed and modeled key aspects of our day - What do we include in our morning meetings? How do we stay safe while adventuring during exploration? What do we use our class drop-box for?- and then adjusted to new routines as well! We worked on culture building through co-creating our class Guiding Principles: We are Respectful, We are Curious, We are Brave, We are Safe, We are Silver Serpents! Silvers started learning about how they can use our guiding principles as a tool through a game of cause-and-effect.

During ELA time, the Silvers worked on setting up their Interactive Notebooks for the year. We personalized our notebooks by exercising our skills with Washi Tape patterns and setting up the sections where we will record and practice our reading and writing skills. This year, the Silver Serpents are especially excited about stories. We worked on paying attention, getting creative, and getting silly with story-telling games. During Snack and Read Aloud, the Silvers are listening with rapt attention to our first book for the year: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, a fantasy-adventure novel inspired by Chinese folklore. As we adventure deeper together into the world of storytelling, the Silver Serpents will get to practice reading new and familiar stories, writing about them, and creating stories of their own!

The Silver Serpents have also familiarized themselves with exciting tools we’ll be using this year to track our learning and observations. First, we received new, custom nature journals, which we are excited to fold into our Brain Blast time. They include dedicated space for metadata and super helpful included and customizable reference sheets. We did our first nature journals of the year, and practiced making observations with a heron wing, a stuffed hawk, and a tube of live fruit flies! We also generated excitement about our upcoming science and math topics through a mystery-topic guessing game. Building routines, practicing expectations, and giving Learners an insight into what's coming up can help ease their back-to-school nerves and start us off on the right foot.

Emerald Elk with Corrie and Luke

The beginning of the 2024-25 school year felt exciting and very humid. Learners voted on the Emerald name, "Elk," as our mascot this year. Already we are learning about the characteristic elk's bugle call and their history roaming here in Virginia. Learners received their nature name, a native species of Virginia that they will research and monitor over the seasonal changes of the year. During academic time, we have tackled beginning-of-the-year tasks like practicing active listening, building norms through shared reading and writing lessons, and strengthening our nature journaling skills. 

While adjusting to a new group of Learners, the Elk co-created shared expectations for the school year, with Educator support. The five values outlined were stewardship, teamwork, courage, flexibility, and kindness. These values and expectations were written into an Emerald Elk Constitution that was signed in charcoal thumbprints on our recent Kinser’s Hike. Along the way, we have already discovered bear scat, a box turtle, and red-spotted newt. As we head into September we look forward to even more discoveries as well as growth in all areas!

SEL with Janelle

In August our Yellow flock rolled into SEL with some exploration of scribbled up feelings and basic emotions, a pass the emotion charades game, beginning stages of designing their calm spot for the year, emotion check ins, and some exploration of teamwork.  Red flock is working on designing a calm spot of their own, identifying spaces that help their bodies learn/focus best, filling each other's buckets, and lots of teamwork goals so they can support each other's individual learning needs. The Silver flock explored emotions through a game of Headbandz, worked towards the components of teamwork that are most important for learning and growing together, and got creative with designing their own deck of emotion flash cards that they are excited to play charades with. The Emerald flock challenged themselves to work in teams while exploring the 8 sensory systems that enable them to be at their optimal learning level, which included a few rounds of charades to fortify the understanding of each sensory system.   

Projects and Knowledge Seekers with Max and Ryan

Projects and Knowledge Seekers spent the Month of August supporting the culture building of our GAP community for the 2024/25 school year. In support of our big idea, "Zoom In: GAP School is a community of life long learners", your child(ren) participated in a variety of team building initiatives including spending time on the challenge course here at Triple C Camp. Later in September the Silver and Emerald flocks will have a chance to continue to strengthen their flock community by participating in high ropes elements on the challenge course.

We spent time playing brain games, such as improv games that exercise our creativity and using OuiSi cards (pronounced "We See) to create connections between images and discuss connections we have amongst ourselves.

The learners first project was to personalize their project notebooks and review how our notebooks are used to contain our project proposals, ideas, and reflections. We have transitioned into our first collaborative art project that we will finish in September and are excited for families to see at community day.