• Community Meeting: December 4
• SELS Board Meeting: December 4
• Minimum Day: December 6
• All School Assembly: December 18
• Winter Break (no school): Dec. 22- Jan. 5

Gratitude Night was a huge success! Thank you to all our volunteers who worked hard to bring back this wonderful community event.

We also want to thank parents and families for Bear Walk donations. Money will be used to help stock classroom libraries, update technology, provide for fieldwork fun, and more. Thanks to our volunteers who made it all happen.

Grocery Outlet reminder... mention SELS at checkout, and they will donate a portion of your total purchase to the SELS PTC.

Upcoming Dates:

• PTC Meeting on January 17 at 5:30 p.m
• Yoga Night Fundraiser on January 24 (more details to come).

Together We Are Crew,



-The SELS PTC

The Minczeski Crew has been learning all about the design process. This knowledge will certainly come in handy when it’s time to apply their new skills to our community building project. The students now have an understanding of a variety of tools and their uses, blueprints, and the importance of testing and improving an idea after creating. 

Our recent trip to Heller Construction was a great success! Students were shown real “blueprints” to help them understand what a plan could look like. They were also given the opportunity to work in a real wood shop and helped create pencil holders. 

At The Discovery Museum in Reno, students participated in all steps of the design process during the Skyscraper Lab. From asking questions about the project at hand to improving the design where necessary, they were up for the challenge, which included simulated earthquakes to check for structural stability.

It will be a rewarding experience for the students to see a final product after applying the steps of the design process and to be able to use all of their newfound skills.

The Bear Walk was a huge success and so much fun! It was great seeing the kids' costumes and watch them use the SIERRA norms when meeting their running goals!

November has been a busy month filled with working on our final expedition poetry project, continuing with fall writing, moving right along with math, and reading, reading, reading! With the change in the weather coming, our outdoor fieldwork season is closing, but we are looking forward to Fox Cultural Hall performances (former Arts for the Schools), some indoor fieldwork, and as always, swim lessons!

Our crew is thankful for the friends we have made at SELS, our families and friends, our homes, our community, our pets, and all the amazing things we get to do and learn here at SELS! 

Gallagher Crew News

This month, the Gallagher Crew has continued their "I've Been Working on the Railroad" Expedition. Students read the graphic novel, "The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad" by Nathan Olson and worked on their note-taking skills in preparation for their final writing project.

Throughout the month, students have also focused on developing an "Attitude of Gratitude" with their Gratitude Jar, various read-alouds and kindness exercises with their crew. Students are truly grateful to attend such a special school and know just how lucky they are to be a part of this amazing crew! 

Students also started up two time-honored crew traditions: Author of the Month and Family Letter Journals. We are so excited to carry on these special activities, creating memories and keepsakes they will hold onto for many years.

Welch Crew News

This month's motto for the Welch Crew was, "We've got an attitude! An attitude of GRATITUDE!" Our crew spent the month reflecting on all the things in our lives that we are grateful for every day, focusing on what we have instead of what we don't. Our crew meetings were spent reading books about gratitude and sharing with each other what makes our lives full of appreciation. We enjoyed a wonderful evening at Gratitude Night hosted by our PTC and then created our own Grateful Pumpkins to bring home during the Thanksgiving break.

One thing our crew is grateful for is the loving support of our families. Thank you for making our crew amazing and sharing your children with us each day. 

We had so much fun at the Bear Walk! The Hansen crew walked/ran a total of 464 laps. Nice work.

Small groups are researching the varied professions that boomed during the California Gold Rush and will create a poster and presentation next month. We also focused on gratitude this month. Students reflected on someone in their lives they are grateful for and wrote them a letter to express their gratitude.

The Brisbin Crew has begun working on their second case study for their Gold Dust and Gun Smoke Expedition. "The Outliers" focuses on those people who made money off prospectors. The "Mined the Miners!" students are currently broken up into teams, becoming experts on different groups, including merchants, traders, blacksmiths, pioneer crafts, doctors, and people who ran kitchens. After researching, students are contributing to a shared online document, which will provide the information for their slideshows and informational posters. Our Crew is thoroughly enjoying this project!

We also finished our anchor text "By the Great Horn Spoon" by Sid Fleischman, and students are wrapping up a colorful one-pager and an online assessment on the story elements of the text. 

In the spirit of the holiday, students have created a gratitude book and acorn craft to present to family and friends, sharing their gratitude for the people they hold the closest. We are a grateful bunch here in the Brisbin Crew!

After reading Seedfolks by Paul Fleichman and studying ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Greek, and Mesoamerican civilizations, the Worster crew has a great foundation for appreciation of diverse cultures. As an extension, we have started the cultural drum project. Our visit from Manas Itene from Michael Franti and Spearhead helped us appreciate how drumming can bring people together into one unifying beat, even with our individuality and diverse cultural backgrounds. Our next step is to use our grant money to buy a variety of drums representing cultural identities and learn to appreciate their similarities and differences as we play together. 

The Santos Crew has been learning all about different regions from around the world and about how cultural diffusion took place during the Middle Ages. We have "journeyed" to Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas to learn about how goods, ideas, and technology spread to make the world more interconnected. We have reenacted the feudal system in Europe and the electing government system in China. 

Students also collaborated to make photo journals of their urban navigation through San Francisco. Some students planned a Prime-Day celebration on 11-17-23, when we learned more about prime numbers and how we use them to do some pretty interesting things. Any day that we can turn math into a party is a good day!

November was filled with all sorts of fossils for our crew as we worked hard on our "Stones & Bones" case study. We looked closely at the fossil record to show us how Earth has changed over time, and used evidence for evolution as a guide to help us understand how species are related to each other and to build phylogenetic trees. We've also worked to show what we know through creating artistic representations of stratigraphic columns of the fossil record. We worked to use clear evidence to support our claims through the lens of Veterans Day, and had the opportunity to re-think Thanksgiving and the ways in which we celebrate and engage with our community.