• Spring Break: April 1-5
• Community Meeting: April 15
• Community Meeting: April 22
• Minimum Day: May 1
• Summit Swirl Fundraiser: May 1

Please consider volunteering!

The PTC still needs volunteers for some of our biggest events of the year! Check our sign-up sheet to see how you can help with Staff Appreciation Week and The Great Skate.

PTC openings next school year:

We would love to see some fresh faces on the PTC next year! Dads are encouraged to join as well. Meetings are once-per-month at a local restaurant (food is included). We make decisions about where grant money will be allocated, ideas for upcoming events, and more. Email ptc@truckeecharterschool.org if you're interested in learning more about joining as:

• Co-chair
• Secretary

Student Yearbooks

Once again, student yearbooks will be sponsored by the PTC. Thanks to our amazing parent volunteers and generous donations from past fundraisers, all students will receive a free yearbook at the end of the year.

Next Meeting — May 15, 5:30pm at Zano's

Join us for free food, good company, and help collaborate on end-of-the-year events and fundraisers!

Together We Are Crew,



The SELS PTC

Migration, hibernation, and toleration — these are some keywords kindergartners are now familiar with regarding animals of the Sierra, thanks to TINS and our classroom research. The winter weather is certainly not for everyone, animals included, and each student spent time researching a migrating and hibernating animal from the area. Students now understand how animals navigate our mountainous region in winter. 

Now that spring has sprung, we look forward to welcoming back pollinators! We hope to entice solitary bees into the bee hotels we made in the fall, and we welcome other important pollinating species with our KinderGarden Project. Once the snow melts, we will not only plant a vegetable garden, but also a pollinator garden!

The Telfer Crew has had an exciting kick-off to spring! We started six weeks of swim lessons at the community pool. Students are using adventure to become better swimmers. We have also been able to see some amazing performances at the Fox Cultural Hall in Kings Beach.

We started our final expedition Amazing Animals, Amazing Me! Each student has a spirit animal they are researching, and they will complete an informational piece in class and an art piece with Ms. Frieberg. We had TINS experts visit us in our class to talk about local animals and answer our many questions about spirit animals.

Gallagher Crew News

This month the Gallagher Crew has been hard at work on their newest expedition, Ready, Set, Go!!! Students investigate forces and motion in sports that include friction, drag, and center of gravity. This month's focus has been on winter sports including skiing, curling, and bobsledding. Students have had opportunities to go out in the field and put these forces to the test while cross country skiing, ice skating, and sledding.  

Welch Crew News

What do cross country skiing, ice skating, sledding and tubing have to do with each other? The answer: Learning is FUN! The key to our spring expedition, Ready, Set, Go!, is to have students learn all about the forces of motion through sports science activities and how to maximize our learning through fieldwork.

We have been learning all about motion, force, friction, push, and pull, with experts joining our crew to teach us about the science behind the sports. The Welch Crew learned about the reasons we wax our skis to reduce friction on the snow so we can ski faster. We learned about push and pull during our ice skating adventure to get momentum to move forward, and some of us learned about gravity when we lost our balance. While tubing and sledding, students experimented with position and weight to see if it made a difference in speed and velocity. Our amazing fieldwork paired with our in-class science labs and experts makes learning science super fun. 

This month, the Hansen Crew experimented with water surface tension and created a beautiful watercolor painting. Students also researched the water cycle, water properties, structure, and characteristics. They are organizing their research in preparation of writing their informative piece on H2O. The Crew also started a new group-read this month, The Wild Robot. They are enjoying the book and are having amazing group discussion related to predictions, reflections, notices, and wonders. The crew is looking forward to getting out on fieldwork in April!

The Brisbin Crew has been working on learning about the properties of water at a molecular and behavioral level. Students have been incorporating art and labs into their learning to understand the importance of water on Earth including watercolor and sharpie abstract art depicting water, labs on cohesion and surface tension, and building models. Next up, students will explore the Earth's four spheres and the characteristics of each; then on to the rock cycle. We are also looking forward to spring fieldwork season!

Twenty-six 6th-grade students, handcrafted drums from across the world, one beat. You may be thinking, "what could go wrong?" My answer is there is no wrong, there is only play, observe, reflect, improve, repeat. Thanks to a grant from the SELS Parent Teacher Crew (PTC), the Worster Crew had the opportunity to use drums to celebrate our diversity and create a shared experience as we continue to dive deeply into our Who Am I Expedition and continue to discover what makes each of us uniquely able to contribute to our community and beyond. As students drum, they get immediate feedback on their effect on other drummers in the circle. It is a powerful learning experience. We are learning that at the end of the day, whether you are contributing the sounds of the middle eastern Doumbek, Aztec Teponatzli, African talking drum, or instrument of your heart, all are welcome and all can fit in. 

The Santos Crew has been having fun in science as we learn about DNA and heredity. Students have told stories with models to explain how DNA and cells replicate themselves. We also were able to identify the phases of mitosis in onion roots under the microscope. This crew did an amazing job in their precision, which got them very clear results.

This month, we also invited some documentary filmmakers into our classroom to teach us how to turn real-life situations into captivating stories. We will work through several storytelling projects and work up to our final product.

Hall Crew worked hard recently to create literary analysis squares about books written from indigenous' perspectives. They've also investigated the events leading up to the American Revolution, complete with simulations of taxation without representation and debates of the Continental Congresses that helped found our country. They've done close readings of the Declaration of Independence and learned about the roots of slavery. We've analyzed the events of the early 1800's, including Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the Indian Removal Act. Students ultimately created beautiful mind-maps to demonstrate how these ideas led to increased sectionalism in our country.

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