Elementary

K/1st: Week of Sept 29

This Week in Alpha “What’s Inside Me” this week? OUR Digestive System! Alphas knew that we feed our bodies with food, but the nutrients in an apple can’t feed our bodies until we break it down. Digestion is all about breaking down and absorbing. Breaking down begins in the mouth. We took a gander at our mouths to get a view of what’s going on in there… We spotted tongues, teeth, uvula… Alphas made a diagram of the anatomy of a mouth! We did a little experiment with pretzels. We pretended our fingers were “fingers” and broke the pretzels into […]

K/1st: Week of Sept 29 Read More »

Kindergarten student displays skeleton drawing at project based school.

3rd/4th: Week of Sept 22

Ahoy, crew! This week we officially launched our Viking longships and rowed into new learning adventures. Our fearless Gammas are absolutely rocking it. They’ve shown some serious leadership, keeping their learning space shipshape and staying on top of their tasks. We can’t wait to see where our Viking journey takes us next week. Full speed ahead! Math This week’s focus was all about solving word problems involving addition and subtraction of larger numbers. We practiced a strategy called UPSC (Understand, Plan, Solve, Check) to help students make sense of one and two step story problems. We also reviewed the algorithm

3rd/4th: Week of Sept 22 Read More »

Two elementary students work together at micro school.

2nd: Week of Sept 22

What a week! In math we are deep into our unit on Place Value. We’ve been representing and comparing numbers in the thousands! We’re also pushing our skip counting skills to their limits and extending them. Along the way we’ve been learning new math games and enjoying playing them with friends. In phonics this week we learned several letter combinations that create sounds that are GLUED together. That means we count them as 1 sound (ang, ing, ong, ung, ank, ink, onk, unk). We practiced building words, sounding out and spelling words with glued sounds, played a couple new games

2nd: Week of Sept 22 Read More »

Elementary student molds clay at private school in Austin.

K/1st: Week of Sept 22

“What’s Inside Me” this week? OUR MUSCLES! We learned that our muscles are always helping us out, whether we tell them to or not. One of our most important muscles is our HEART! This incredible muscle keeps our blood pumping all day and all night. Sometimes our heart works extra hard…like when we exercise! We used a stethoscope to listen to our hearts before and after running. Alpha students noticed a HUGE difference in the amount of beats. Before the exercise, some students could barely hear the beat, but after it, it sounded like their hearts might jump out of

K/1st: Week of Sept 22 Read More »

Kindergarten student uses stethoscope at STEM school.

3rd/4th: Week of Sept 15

This week we set sail on our Viking longships! Our Gammas are in full swing now and doing an amazing job. We feel like we are really getting to know them, and we are proud of how responsible they are with assignments keeping our classroom clean and organized. We had an action-packed week, and are looking forward to another great one! Math We practiced adding and subtracting large numbers using the standard algorithm as well as strip diagrams. We also learned to check our subtraction by using addition. ELA We taught our students the “five finger rule” to use when

3rd/4th: Week of Sept 15 Read More »

Elementary student holds cardboard tool at project based school.