Showcasing our success!

We have so much to celebrate in just half a school year!

Last week, we came together to celebrate all our students have learned at our second quarterly showcase.  Students showed off their vehicles of the future, challenged their parents to program BeeBots, and played with their favorite building toys.  We also got to show off our Helix portfolios - collections of student work that demonstrate how much our students have progressed.  

Our students have so much to celebrate, and it was an honor to share that hard work with families. One of our students read his first ever book! Another student has found the courage to let other people listen to him read! Yet another student has made almost a year's progress in math in the last few months!

My favorite part of showcase was the opportunity to see our entire community come together.  Our Helix families are absolutely the best - looking out for each other, sharing resources, and supporting each other and our school.  Every time we come together, I am simply overwhelmed with gratitude for the community we are building.

It is also a delight to see how our community has grown.  We are so excited to welcome new classmates to our school, as well as our fabulous new teaching assistant, Brian.  We’re so glad you’re here!

As we reflected on this quarter, a lot of our favorite moments centered around our fabulous guest speakers.  During our History of Transportation unit, we've been delighted to have guest speakers who have shared their enthusiasm and knowledge about vehicles of different eras.

Thank you to Mr. Chris from the Santa Clara County Model T for teaching us all about

Lizzie, his Model T. Our students really loved getting to see a Model T in person, and learn about all the ways it is different from cars today. We especially loved honking the horn.

We would also like to give a huge thank you to Ms. Anne from Waymo for (very patiently) answering all of our questions about autonomous vehicles. Our students have been obsessed with Waymo since the beginning of the school year, and we had so much fun learning more about how they work. We were also really excited to see the newest Waymo model up close (which is still being tested by employees).