• Winter Break (no school): Dec. 22- Jan. 5
• MLK Day (no school): January 15
• Celebration of Learning: January 18
• Middle School Minimum Days: January 25 + 26

Our first grant cycle is over! Here are some highlights of grants we were able to fund:

• 3 "new teacher" grants for classroom supplies
• Classroom set of headphones
• Classroom furniture
• Classroom set of drums from around the world
• Classroom set of Crazy-Creeks chairs 
• Middle School Mathletes

Parents make it happen!

A huge thank you to our amazing event coordinators and other parent volunteers for bringing Gratitude Night back. These events only happen because of our incredible parent volunteers. 

Our next PTC meeting is on January 17 at 5:30pm. Watch the SELS weekly email and social media for details on location. We'll be discussing the next grant cycle and upcoming events. We'd love to have parents join us and help brainstorm ways to support our students, teachers and the SELS community.

Together We Are Crew,



-The SELS PTC

We have some busy little bees in the Minczeski Crew! For our building project, kindergartners are learning not only about giving back to our community but to the environment (not to mention it has been a wonderful journey for the students to turn five unique blueprint designs into real creations). 

Through building bee hotels, students are learning about the importance of bees to our ecosystem and why we should support solitary bee populations. As the primary pollinators of plants, and learning how populations of bees are in decline, we hope to do a small part in supporting our native bees. As we fast-forward to spring, our Kinder-Garden Expedition project will hopefully create an inviting area for these beneficial pollinators to call home.

With many of our final projects close to being completed and our I Love the Mountains Expedition done, we have had a month of getting back on track with our daily academic work! We have been working hard on learning new and fun ways to work with buddies to complete math work. We have also been learning new reading patterns to help us become more fluent readers.

We started our My Opinion Matters writing unit, and our labyrinth is officially done! A huge thank you to Telfer Crew parents, Jose Rivero, Russ Pile, and Heather Fairbairn for installing our sign. Check it out, it looks amazing! The Telfer Crew is looking forward to our winter break, especially spending time with our families, friends and pets, traveling, skiing, snowboarding, ice skating, drinking hot cocoa, and hopefully seeing some snow fly! 

Gallagher Crew News

This month, the Gallagher Crew has been working on our final writing piece on the Transcontinental Railroad. Students have shown so much pride in their work and love sharing their expertise with others! Throughout December, we have also focused on this month's Design Principle, Solitude and Reflection. Students created their own Solitude and Reflection journals and have enjoyed taking time for themselves reflecting on their feelings, senses, and memories.  

We have also loved having snow back on campus! It's starting to feel like winter is finally here. Students love playing soccer in the snow and building "the biggest snowman ever!" We are looking forward to the many adventures this winter will surely bring.

Welch Crew News

The Welch Crew continues to improve their literacy skills in class by reading a variety of texts, including magazines. Many thanks to Excellence in Education for the generous grant, which supplies our classroom with supplemental reading materials that include magazine subscriptions that have a high interest to students. Our classroom magazines range from Sports Illustrated for Kids to National Geographic for Kids and everything in between. These subscriptions give students a chance to read different types of texts that help improve their fluency and comprehension. Having shared reading time with crewmates is a highlight of our reading time in class. 

The Hansen Crew has been diving into research about the Gold Rush Outliers. Students are creating a History Mystery Book and will present it to the class, giving them clues so they can try and guess who the mystery outlier is. 

We are continuing our narrative stories and in the last weeks of December we are reviewing, editing, and writing our final drafts. Fourth grade math students are working hard learning our new math curriculum, and we recently participated in a collaborative activity that had students working through challenges together.

The Brisbin Crew is working on finishing their second case study, The Outliers, with a History Mystery Project. Students are assigned a secret character from the California Gold Rush time period. Using evidence from research, the students are creating a slideshow presentation and History Mystery Book; but they're not revealing who their character is. At then end, readers can guess the character based on their knowledge of these individuals from learning about them in a separate slideshow, also made by the students. They are ramping up for the construction of the Brizbomb Diggins mining town for Celebration of Learning!

The Ancient World Summit portrait project is more than just art skills. Yes, 6th graders learn about value shading, but they also learn skills and strategies they can transfer to other areas in life, like breaking large — and sometimes overwhelming — projects into manageable chunks. They also learn about creating new drafts from constructive feedback and how to let go of perfectionism. Portraits will be on display at the Ancient World Summit during Celebration of Learning in January. A huge thank you to Ms. Frieberg for her expertise and help in this project. 

The Santos Crew finished up their second case study, The World Connects, in which they explored the ways various world regions influenced each other. We looked at technologies, ideas, philosophies, religion, and goods such as vegetables, animals, and spices. Each student became an expert on a specific region. Then, we went into the gym and simulated traveling along the Silk Road and across the Atlantic Ocean to connect with other regions of the world. They each taught a small group of students about their region, creating games and activities that emphasizes the most important points. We also had a lovely day tasting food from around the world!

The Santos Crew also led Bear Dens in teamwork and friendly competition in our community meeting based on the EL motto, "We are crew, not passengers."

The Hall Crew has been working hard to learn about the role of some "hidden figures" in the Space Race of the 1960s and the ways in which these important women served as a catalyst for social, cultural, and scientific change. We've read some of their stories, discussed their work, and are working hard to use evidence from the text to create thoughtful essays about these hidden figures. 

We have also worked to formalize our learning about fossils by creating some collective murals and learning some spray-painting techniques to create portraits of index fossils known as trilobites. We are excited about the final fieldwork of our Planet Earth Expedition, with a nighttime telescope viewing of the moon and a trip to Fleischmann Planetarium in Reno.