• All School Assembly + PTC Coffee Cart: October 9
• SELS Site Seminar: October 12-13
• Summit Day: October 13
• Make-up Picture Day: October 16
• Minimum Day Week + Student-Led Conferences: October 23-27
• Community Meeting: October 30
• Bear Walk: October 31

Sponsorships

Thank you to this year's sponsors so far! Mountain Home Center, Heller Construction, Tahoe Adventure Company, and West Orthodontics. Your contributions directly impact SELS students. We appreciate your support.  

PTC Meeting + Thank You

The first Parent Teacher Crew meeting at Cottonwood last week was a huge success! Thank you to all the parents who attended. Mark your calendars for our next meeting on October 4 at 5:30. Location will be announced soon! 

We Have a New Co-chair!

Thank you, Heather Fairbairn, for stepping up to be the next PTC co-chair. Heather has been a co-chair previously, and we're so appreciative of her taking the reins once again. When Carrie steps down at the end of this year, we will need another co-chair. If you want to know what it's all about, come to one of our meetings. You can view the schedule here.

Volunteer Opportunities 

THANK YOU to all the parents who came to our PTC meeting last week and signed up to volunteer. We still have openings! Immediate needs are for the upcoming Family Photo Shoot and Gratitude Night Committee. Sign up here.  

Grocery Outlet Fundraiser 

This is an ongoing fundraiser—just tell the checker at Grocery Outlet that you're with Sierra Expeditionary Learning School, and they will donate a percentage of your check's total to the SELS PTC. 

Together We Are Crew, Not Passengers



-The SELS PTC

The Minczeski Crew has had a wonderful start to the kindergarten year! These little ones are full of energy, enthusiasm, and wonderful ideas. Our first few weeks have been spent getting to know each other and becoming accustomed to the routines and expectations of kindergarten. The children have spent time with math manipulatives and counting, as well as practicing “reading to self” by telling about pictures and looking for letters and sounds they know.

We have also spent these first weeks learning and identifying good crew behaviors, including sharing and working cooperatively. As a crew, we have read several stories about friendship, and the students are able to easily identify behaviors they wish to cultivate in our crew. Our SIERRA norms are at the core of our learning, and the students are motivated to recognize their crew members for demonstrating Strength, Integrity, Empathy, Respect, Responsibility, and Adventure. We love seeing them care for each other and work to establish a sense of CREW!

The Telfer Crew has hiked our way through September. We used the SIERRA norms to create goals and overcome hiking challenges, and we used empathy to support our crew mates. Our hiking experiences have inspired poetry; we learned about different types of poetry and wrote beautiful poems on each of our hikes. Our new poetry skills may be making their way to a Summit Day soon!

We will continue our hiking adventures into October and prepare for an amazing Summit Day. In class, we are all learning how to be good friends and hard-working learners. 

Seaborg Crew News

The Seaborg Crew has been connected with each other through various team-building activities, especially at our first campout at Tahoe Donner. This was the first time many of the students slept in tents without adults! Our fieldwork schedule has been packed, especially as we learn about the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. We visited Truckee Regional Park to ride a mini-train and experts provided students will further insights about the railroad. Our latest trip to Granite Sky offered the students a new perspective as we took in the enormous challenges that railroad crews faced while constructing routes through the treacherous terrain of the Donner Summit and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The crew is excited to welcome Danielle and April! Since they've been at SELS, they've been building relationships with the students and working with me on planning. Thank you for all your support during this transition. 

Welch Crew News

It's been all fabulous fall fieldwork for the Welch crew in September! As we have kicked off the beginning of the school year, the Welch crew has jumped in with both feet into fieldwork season. The crew started with their first overnight of the year and the 3rd graders enjoyed a day at Sand Harbor with Trails and Vistas. Students are already beginning to learn about the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the difficulties in building such a grand project. Students were able to learn about railroad safety with lessons from the Truckee Historical Railroad Society and ride the Truckee River Regional Park Railroad.

This is a small taste of what is to come as students continue to learn more about the major players in the railroad, the economy and industries used by the railroad, and support opinions about the building of the railroad. Stay tuned for more to come. 

This crew is so much fun! We started off the school year with crew building activities that brought us together. We also kicked off our Gold Dust and Gun Smoke Fieldwork by heading out on a 3-route simulation hike to Cold Stream. We pulled fate cards and earned and lost gold coins along the way. We even found GOLD! Teams weighed their gold and analyzed data. We enjoyed a visit from SWEP to learned about watersheds and how they impacts our environment. Our last fieldwork of September took us on an overnight to Malakoff Diggins and Empire Mine. 

We kicked off students' building background knowledge workshop on the California gold rush by simulating the three routes prospectors took when migrating to California to seek gold. Splitting into three teams—the overland route, the Isthmus of Panama route, and the Cape Horn route—students pulled fate cards, earned gold coins, lost gold coins, and actually struck the mother load themselves! When students returned back to school, each team counted their gold coins and nuggets and weighed them to see who was the overall winner!

The Worster Crew traveled to the Schulman Grove of Bristlecone Pine Trees in the White Mountains in search of what defines a civilization and how intentionally creating our crew culture can shape the community around us. We were welcomed into the Owens Valley Cultural Center for insight into the values and traditions of the Shoshone and Paiute tribes, met with pen pals at the Big Pine Middle School to compare and contrast who we are and our experiences at EL schools, and hiked four miles at 9,500 feet amongst trees that are over 4,000 years old. Coming home, we were left with a sense of awe for the world around us and appreciation for our crew. 

The Santos Crew kicked off the new school year with their Cartographers and Commanders Expedition. After learning how coordinates work, the students went on a Truckee-wide treasure hunt where they had to complete team challenges to earn their next set of coordinates. All three teams worked together well and made it to the final destination. We spent the rest of the month creating maps and learning how to use a compass. The high level of geometric reasoning that these kids did was incredible. 

September has been a busy month for Hall Crew as we've been digging deep into how well we really know each other. We've made some interactive Zines revealing some of our most cherished possessions, created poems about "Where We Are From" and have been working to build meaningful empathy with each other through fieldwork up at the Sierra Buttes Fire Lookout. We've begun reframing our mathematical mindsets to really see ourselves as capable mathematicians, harnessing the power of "yet" as we dive into effective problem solving and communication strategies.

We started our year with really honing in our scientific observation skills through creating "Metric Mini Me" self portraits and using evidence to explain our inferences. We kicked off our Planet Earth Science Expedition with our current case study "Mountain Maker, Earth Shaker" as we learn about Earth’s processes of creating & recycling rocks. We're looking forward to fieldwork at Lassen National Park in October to really explore some of these geological features in action.