• Community Meeting: Feb. 5
• Minimum Day: Feb. 7
• PTC Meeting: Feb. 7
• Family Dance: Feb. 9
• All-School Assembly + HOWs 100: Feb. 12
• Ski/Skate Week (no school): Feb. 19-23

Yoga Night: Huge thank you to Meghan Ruiz and Tahoe Yoga and Wellness for making the SELS PTC Yoga Night a success. It was a wonderful evening full of relaxation, grounding, and connection.

Family Dance: We're looking forward to seeing everyone at the annual Family Dance on Feb. 9 at 6 p.m. (keep an eye out for fliers coming home with more details).

We need your help: 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.

Join us on Feb. 7: We would love to see SELS parents at our next meeting at 5:30 p.m. Watch for an email with location information.

Together We Are Crew,



The SELS PTC

The kindergartners were thrilled to present their work during Celebration of Learning! You could feel the children’s pride as they toured their families around the room. Some of the highlights were watching the students explain the SIERRA norms, sharing the importance of bees and why building bee hotels could help their survival, presenting and reading the newly published ABC Book of Tools (by the Minczeski Crew), and demonstrating their newfound engineering skills through ramp challenges.

Students are now looking forward to more science explorations. Not only will we continue to experiment with force and motion, but we will soon enter the exciting world of weather!

The Telfer Crew did an amazing job at Celebration of Learning, especially showing off their final I Love the Mountains poems. They worked hard to write and edit their poems and write a final, decorated draft to create a masterpiece!

We have been working hard in math, learning all sorts of new strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems. We continue to be very opinionated with our My Opinion Matters writing unit. As we move forward, we are looking forward to swim lessons, fieldwork for our new expedition: Amazing Animals, Amazing Me, and our first SELS campout in May! 

Gallagher Crew News

The Gallagher Crew is excited to jump into their new mini-expedition, The Wonderful World of Ecosystems. Students kicked off the expedition by explaining what they already know about ecosystems, identifying what they would like to learn, and then briefly exploring our various research materials to find an interesting fact to share. They LOVED digging into our new classroom books and the books we borrowed from the Truckee Library. Students are looking forward to learning more about our local ecosystem, the various ecosystems of the world, and what they can do to protect them!

Welch Crew News

This month, the Welch Crew was the recipient of a wonderful gift from SWEP (Sierra Watershed Education Partnerships). In partnership with Truckee Tahoe Airport Community Partners and Town of Truckee / Keep Truckee Green, SWEP has a goal of reducing waste and greenhouse gas emission through climate action initiatives. This includes smart sorting bins, reusable utensils at lunch, and a soon-to-arrive compostable bin for lunch food waste to reduce methane gases from landfills. 

This year, SWEP's continuing efforts are focused on reducing lunch waste on campus. Our Green Team is eager to reduce the amount of plastic bags and packaging while supporting behavioral changes that stop food waste and end our daily habit of single-use plastics. The Green Team decided the solution is bento boxes!

All 2nd/3rd grade students are encouraged to attempt a zero waste lunch, and to help, they were gifted a complimentary bento box. The Welch Crew is so grateful to SWEP and the Green Team for these new lunch boxes, and we are doing our part to reduce our single-use plastic waste.

In the Hansen Crew we are wrapping up our Gold Dust and Gun Smoke Expedition, which has been so much fun! We recently created a mining town replica including an assay office, saloon, gold panning station and more! Our crew had a great time designing and collaborating with each other when building. It was awesome to see students sharing their knowledge with their families at Celebration of Learning, and with all the crews that visited during school hours. In the last days of January we are applying our mining technique knowledge and will complete the expedition with technical drawings. 

The Brisbin Crew had a busy January! This month, we wrapped up our Gold Dust and Gun Smoke Expedition and set up our very own mining camp in our classroom. For Celebration of Learning, students ran various activities within their "tent" and had visitors experience what life was like in 1849. Visitors experienced a barber shop, general store, gold panning, kids corner, tinsmithing, jumping frogs, a restaurant, jail, assay office, map making, crisscross letter writing, and a learning panel, which described our case studies and final projects. This is a favorite event, and students had a great time demonstrating and explaining what we have learned!

We had the honor of being joined by delegates from far reaches of the ancient world to find out which civilizations had the greatest impact on our society today. All students did an amazing job working hard to prepare for this daunting presentation, crafting portraits and drawings of artifacts or symbols of their best claim, and looking amazing in their homemade costumes! Thanks to all the parents for judging and providing an audience, making this event an authentic and impactful experience for the ancient delegates and modern citizens alike. 

The Santos Crew finished the semester with fun games to play with their families during Celebration of Learning. They researched an explorer from and created a game that followed their journey. In addition, they made question cards that showed all their learning from the beginning of the school year until now. At Celebration of Learning, they took their parents on a journey around the world and explained what they learned about each region. They did a great job of using their work to recall history from the Middle Ages. 

Students are also becoming leaders of their own learning. They are challenging each other to build trust and community so they feel comfortable and safe in their work. They are working hard in math, using teamwork to help each other build understanding and review math concepts. Everybody wins when the whole group works to elevate others. 

The Hall Crew worked hard to build an interactive science museum for Celebration of Learning. We researched scientific concepts, wrote informational display boards, and built beautiful museum exhibits to teach others. We worked together to learn to use new tools, provide feedback for improvement, and support each other's projects. We also created a ton of art to visually show how Earth has changed over time, including spray painting trilobite fossils, producing watercolor paintings of stratigraphic columns, and working on a collaborative class mural. To create the mural, we individually researched a specific time period in Earth's history and then created a group mural to depict the environmental landscape, significant species, and key events that shaped that time period.