May at GAP School!

Yellow Mushrooms with Emily and Virginia

During the last month of school, learners were in awe as they saw their hard work come to life! Our word, digraph, and letter blend walls were laminated and ready to go into our classrooms as we did our spelling bee and nature journals. In honor of our bee theme, our word walls represented a honeycomb! Each piece of the wall was crafted by a Yellow Mushroom with their own artistic take and handwriting. Our spelling bee consisted of learners being given a whiteboard, marker, and word to sound out and spell. Each word was represented by phonics and rules we learned throughout the year together! After embarking on bee research as a class, learners displayed a favorite bee fact of their choice at Community Day! 'Bee-search' was a hit! Other activities that learners did as they wrapped up the school year were reading daily messages, books, sentence building, sentence writing, and class favorite spelling games.

During our last week of school we had some fun interactive lessons that included technology from the past! Together we read a fan favorite book: Click Clack Moo Cows that Type, while exploring a real life typewriter! Afterwards, students practiced following along to print that contained music and poetry! Something that has been done for the last four years in the K-1 flocks is the introduction of poetry through the beauty of a record player. Learners gathered around and followed along to each stanza of the world famous John Denver song, "Take Me Home, Country Roads." As a class we talked about not only the format of poetry, but John Denver's love of nature. In nature journals afterwards, we connected to the spring growth found in our learning space. It was a beautiful way to end our school year as Yellow Mushrooms!

May in math has been a lot of review! We went back to content from the beginning of the year to revisit place value, friends of tens, and other addition and subtraction strategies and word problems. Using fun games like "Math Safari" and "Rat a Tat Cat" to reinforce these concepts. Continue to review math over the summer by including your learner in simple everyday math problems, like calculating weight while grocery shopping or telling time on an analog clock.

As we wrapped up the year in science, we were able to study and explore a lot of the spring wildlife! We have found a lot of interesting things to nature journal while using a microscope to zoom in on natural phenomena! At the end of the year, we cooled off and explored thermodynamics by designing a shelter to slow the melting of ice cubes! We hope your family can continue to explore the natural world this summer!

Red Hamsters With Lauren

The Red Hamsters have been able to apply their math work from this year into their projects these past two months. It’s fun for them to experience firsthand the many ways that math makes our lives so much easier, along with making constructing and cooking goals successful! We’ve compared the measurements of various volumes of water and used these comparisons to show greater than, less than, and equal to. The learners are now able to complete the math for equivalent fractions without using measurement for verification. Through both mapping and adjusting scales, the Hamsters have been able to see useful relationships with fractions. The students' mapping abilities have come a long way in the course of this year. At this point their maps are not only easier to use for navigation, but are also detailed and impressively artistic. It has been so much fun to see the students comparing weights, lengths, and volumes in our natural spaces here at GAP School! 

Settlers of Catan has been remade by the Red Hamsters to include the “ingredients for growth” that they think make up the things we use and need. The final list for their main sources of the ‘most important everyday items’ includes: metal, chemicals (plastic), wood, seeds/soil, water, clay, and wool. (They noted that each of these go back to the sources of either animals, plants, or minerals.) Their game is named "Survival on Hamster Island" and is the culmination of many lengthy discussions, illustration attempts, patience, and fun! They are all so proud of the final product that they created! 

In our final parts of speech review, the learners continued to be excited to apply their adjectives and adverbs to enhance the details of their stories. We hope the learners will continue writing their stories over the summer months and discover inspiration for new ones. While the learners decided not to display their homonym inspired joke book for Community Day, please feel free to request they share a few of their jokes with you! 

Thanks to all of you for a fantastic year; we couldn’t do it without you! We are so lucky to make the magic of GAP School come alive for the learners each day. Have a wonderful summer and don’t forget to make trips to the library and keep reading! 

Silver Serpents with Furn and Elijah

Rain soaks the soil. Flowers continue to burst forth from our garden and the woods around us. Fledgling robins leave the nest, just as another year of learning at GAP School ends and our learners level-up or leave our flocks. We couldn’t be more proud of them. The Silver Serpents have worked hard to make their third and fourth grade years truly outstanding. Together, we have braved intense heat with patience and biting cold with joy. We have put forth our best work for our families and friends at our Community Days. We have challenged ourselves as scientists, authors, mathematicians, geographers, musicians, philosophers, artists, crafters, naturalists, dancers, athletes, gardeners, custodians, and, perhaps most importantly, friends. We have become better versions of ourselves. We have become close. 

In SEL, the Silver Serpents finished the year with a “capstone” project. This year, we implemented a Compliment Wall—an opportunity for learners to share and reflect on each other’s wins, positive qualities, and accomplishments. The Silvers would randomly get one to three names for whom to write anonymous compliments. Then, we would view them as a group. However, for our last Community Day, we ramped up the ante and did a FULL CLASS COMPLIMENT WALL! Each learner received a sheet with all of their classmates’ names and had to come up with a kind, specific, thoughtful compliment about each learner. Their educators compiled their compliment lists into keepsakes that were on display during Community Day and sent home during the last week of school. These lists will hopefully serve as reminders of the importance of community, sharing kindness, reflection, and of course, their positive qualities for the rest of their lives. What a special class gift to have created collaboratively!

In ELA, the Serpents worked on the last stage of their writing processes that they started back in November. Halfway through the year, the Serpents started writing their own pieces of fiction. For the last month of school, we focused on ramping up our creative writing skills by continuing these pieces, or deciding we wanted to create something new! Part of the creative writing process is deciding if you do want to invest more thought into an idea, or if you would rather invest your focus into something different. As we develop our skills as authors, we also get to take the reins of our creative vision and exercise our agency as writers. And the Serpents blew this project out of the water. Whether they decided to continue their stories or create something different like a poem, field guide page, or comic strip, the Serpents wrote long, complex stories that far exceeded the goals and expectations we set out at the beginning of the project. We spent several classes with open-ended creative writing time, editing time, and final drafting exercises to complete our pieces. At Community Day, we showcased our creative writing pieces to families. In the process, we learned more about ourselves as authors—what kinds of writing do we love? What kinds of writing do we want to create? To emulate? The more we write, the more we learn about writing. And this year, we wrote quite a LOT!

In Math, the Silver Serpents finished out the year by sharpening their skills with telling time. By using clock manipulatives, we practiced identifying the hour, the minute, the second, and measuring elapsed time. To extend our work with lines, angles, polygons, and other shapes, we also crafted clocks! By creating and cutting a circle, finding a center point, measuring out 90 degree and 30 degree increments from perpendicular lines, and creating pictorial indices, the Serpents fashioned their own clocks! The end of any cycle is bittersweet—but when you’ve had as much fun crafting, writing, and exploring as we have, you can only revel in the excitement of what comes next!

This May, the Silvers worked hard on their end of year science projects! Given a common ancestor, Silvers were challenged with creating a new species that fit either the mountains, desert, or rainforest. We first identified the environmental pressures of each landscape—what would the creature need to adapt to? After they were assigned their environment, we brainstormed and rough-drafted our new species' adaptations and appearances. We then wrote mini-stories about how the common ancestor got to this landscape, and how it adapted over many generations to best fit the environment. After completing our final drafts of both our mini-stories and our animal figures, we dove into making dioramas of each landscape. The dioramas were entirely planned and created by the learners. Between paper macheting mountains, water coloring cellophane, and imitating a rushing river, our creativity and collaboration shined during this project. We were so excited to present our final dioramas and write-ups on Community Day! After Community Day, we had our final week of school. Though we were very busy with our Walnut Creek field trip, a Kinser's hike, and more fun events, we still managed to fit in an end of year Science Review—complete with a scavenger hunt with Furn and Elijah as magical wizards. We are looking forward to all the science learning we’ll share next year. 

Emerald Elk with Corrie and Luke

Much like their namesake, the Emerald Elk stampeded energetically to the end of the school year with high spirits and creativity. In Projects and Knowledge Seekers, finishing touches were put on impressive projects—from trebuchets to “Trojan Unicorns” and fairy wings to falcon masks. For Choose-Your-Own Adventures, the Elk began building a new bridge over Kinser’s creek, honed their athletic abilities on the handball court, caught critters at Water Chicken Way, and so much more! They concluded the year with a week of fun and stewardship by packing up their learning space, canoeing at Walnut Creek, climbing and ziplining, and toasting s’mores at the top of Kinser’s Climb. Each learner has shown more growth than an invasive stilt grass patch over the course of the school year, and each has much to be proud of heading into a well-deserved summer break.  

As the school year wrapped up, the middle schoolers explored probability in math by investigating the outcomes of different events. They made connections with familiar objects like dice, cards, and spinners, and learned how to apply a formula to predict possible outcomes. Meanwhile, the fifth graders studied order of operations with the help of a catchy "PEMDAS" song. This approach helped them understand the sequence for solving math problems and introduced them to exponents, setting a strong foundation for algebraic thinking in sixth grade.

In ELA, the “Capybaroos” and “Titanium Turtles” groups continued their study of character development, per the fourth quarter big idea of “ingredients for growth.” For their final Community Day product, learners took a “design challenge” approach by planning and executing their own ELA projects that fulfilled the requirements of: discussing character growth, displaying different conflict types, and showing how setting affects plot. Products included short stories, podcasts, and even persuasive pieces! To tie it all together, learners created sculptures symbolizing the “growth” of their characters with abstract model trees. Showing persistence, creativity, and enthusiasm, each learner rose to their fullest potential throughout the process, and their work truly spoke for itself. 

In the meantime, the “Crazy Crows” concluded both their personal novel studies and their group study of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. After tracking the steps of the "Hero’s Journey" in their personal reading, they used this knowledge to create a new framework based on Napoleon’s character arc, which they dubbed the "Villain’s Journey.” Their physical product for Community Day reflected the different steps of this process, and incorporated a depiction of the windmill from the novel. Each Crazy Crow then composed an analytical paragraph by selecting and analyzing quotes to compare the two books they had read, and offered solutions for “growth” beyond the types of corruption they investigated in Animal Farm. Well done, Crazy Crows!

Social Emotional Learning with Janelle

This month, the Yellow Mushrooms and Red Hamsters further explored teamwork and inclusivity. We explored perspective through the book A Tale of Two Beasts and had group discussions about what makes us different and how we can use active listening and self awareness to build friendship and community. We learned about “flipping our lids” with a hand brain model and reflected on the fact that we aren’t in control when our thinking brain flips and exposes our emotional brain. We discussed confidence, happiness, and peacefulness as qualities that help our spot of love grow and planted wildflowers as a way to watch what happens to seeds when they are watered with those feelings. Hopefully you enjoy continuing to watch the flowers grow and spread love to the pollinators in your yards.  

Silver serpents also continued their discussions and reflections on the qualities of a good friend, inclusion, and community. They created a friendship chain for their flock for which each learner wrote good friend qualities for each of the other learners. We also explored the concept of perspective and what makes each of them unique. We ended the year with small group rounds of "What Do You Meme: Emotion Edition" and a chill out in the body socks. 

The Emerald Elk continued work on their small group projects. Some learners worked on emotions clay pieces and the topic of self regulation, which sparked a conversation about bringing emotional awareness to their morning meeting and ELA time as a form of a learner/educator check-in. Others worked on a prototype for a GAP School escape room as they reflected on the importance of teamwork, inclusiveness, and communication.

Projects and Knowledge Seekers with Max and Ryan

May in Projects was a great time for wrapping up all our Maker Day projects, reflecting on our growth through the year and ending with celebration and gratitude. Learners took time in May to reflect on their year through the lens of our big idea "Ingredients for Growth." All flocks, discussed parallels between plant growth and how people grow. "Growth" in these discussions was not around our physical growth but rather how we grow in our learning, how we grow as friends and how we grow into the best person we can be. Our older flocks explored how to create metaphors around this idea and all flocks created 2D or 3D sculptures to build a "Garden of Growth" to display on community day. The Emerald flock explored the work of Louise Nevelson, a 20th Century artist, who created "assemblages" out of found materials. The Emerald's created their own assemblages with each component reflecting their own growth from the year. Silvers created garden plants or animals using found materials on cardboard and wrote metaphors outlining how each creation was a metaphor for how a Learner might grow during the school year. Finally, both Yellow and Red created a variety of garden plants and animals that were then integrated into the actual school garden.

When we were not creating and reflecting on our Community Day products, Learners wrapped up maker day projects and supported with various garden tasks. Students helped with more planting, weeding, staking out and making twine runners for vines.

During our Maker Days and the last week of school students began to create their last day of school parade costumes. An annual tradition at GAP, the last day parade is somthing that everyone looks forward to. It's simplicity is the secret to it's success. We simply parade around for no one but ourselves and everyone wears something that they created at school. This year, we saw costumes go to another level with multiple costume themes organized amongst Learners. There were plenty of MineCraft themed designs, a Flintstones theme from the Red Flock, a group of 6 Silvers who were a horse drawn carraige, a unicorn complete with handler, a two person horse costume, and so much more. Most importantly, the parade costumes show how much Learners have grown in their making skills and creative confidence.

We’re grateful for another year at GAP School, a year filled with growth, curiosity, and connection. We had the privilege of watching our learners and educators evolve as human beings: tackling challenges, asking big questions, learning from one another, and stepping into more confident versions of themselves. As we wrote this year’s certificates, we were reminded of the deep hope we hold for the future, because if GAP kids are out in the world, the world is in good hands.

We hope all of our GAP families have a wonderful summer full of exploration, adventure, challenges, and fun.