Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

  Dear SBLC families,      We are so grateful for all of you! Thanks for the gorgeous rosemary trees and for all of the gift card goodies we found in the branches. Both of us look forward to a little shopping and relaxation over winter break. We loved the chance to visit with you at our winter party and so appreciate all of your contributions to our tasty breakfast buffet and our cute penguin craft.      We were able to fill 7 backpacks as a donation to Carrying Hope. Your generosity will help a lot of kiddos in need of some comfort at a challenging time and we love that our community showed such support!      Here's a glimpse into our week through some fun pictures! Happy Holidays all - see you in January!

We've come back from a wonderful break, refreshed and ready to learn! SBLC students have been hard at work and jumped in with both feet! We hope you enjoyed looking through the portfolios at the halfway point, and it launched some conversations about keeping up the Quality Work they are doing! We've been enjoying the weather via our outdoor space! Lots of fun varying up our learning environment! Our project time has focused on our Service Project for Carrying Hope. Students have learned about the organization and who they help, created a sign up, and are eager to build these important packs to help a child their age. Check your email for a student-designed donation sign up. In ELA, we've been learning how to actively annotate, take notes, cite sources, and summarize text! Our in class research has been supporting our experimentation in science, and has helped us complete our In Class Science Fair Project Notebook. We've been learning about insulators, me...

Rowan and Caroline present their project at Kiker morning assembly. This week we continued our work on our Voice and Choice projects. It's exciting to see the pursuit of understanding important issues, and what we each can do to inspire change. Rowan and Caroline have been learning to put faces to the concern of bullying, and Ms. Fraser invited them to use their information to create a presentation for AISD's Unity Day. They did a fantastic job creating a Google Slide presentation. Their word choices and images kept Kiker's entire student body quiet and listening to what they had to share. In ELA, we created our very first independent outline for our Expository writing. Our writing community recognized that it was an opportunity to put Say, Mean, Matter into effect, and how easy it was to organize. We've been analyzing compound sentences with multiple predicates and conjunctions. In addition, we are honing our accuracy skills with spelling and complete s...

Beautiful weather, fabulous fall! This week our learners have been hard at work using nonfiction signposts with our social studies text. We've been looking at it with a questioning stance, and coming up with BIG questions. As Rowan put it so wisely, "How does this affect our classroom? How is it changing what I am learning?" She's already internalized what we are all developing in ourselves as readers -- read widely, and know that there are many, many different versions to actively consider to understand a subject deeply. We are discovering things about the Native American tribes here in Texas, and how they lived/adapted to each region of Texas. In ELA, we continue our journey with Alex in Eleven.  We are really taking steps to further grasp the theme of each and every chapter, and how those synthesize to become an overall author's purpose and overall theme. We use our text every week to explore multi meaning vocabulary, sentence structure, and as a base fo...

Thanks for meeting with us over these past few weeks! We have enjoyed getting together as a team and finding areas where we can continue to support these amazing learners! This week we've embarked on an exciting journey! We are developing projects which we feel we have a voice/passion for to investigate and to communicate about. It's exciting to see our SBLC citizens thinking about a deep question and how they can research, innovate, and inspire change. In ELA, we've moved forward with our analysis of character in that we are nearing the climax of the book. We've been examining our character's actions and noticed that changes are happening, yet our author, Tom Rogers, has left us with enough unknowns to keep us wondering. With that, it is essential that we cite text evidence to support our ideas, thinking, and further questions. We are walking through each piece together as guided practice, and then challenged to take these skills into our independent reading. I...

Happy Friday! We have been hard at work, settling into our routines. In Language Arts, we've been constructing letters, learning multi-paragraph structure and how to elaborate our main ideas with specific details (You've probably received this already!). We've been digging into our library to find those Just Right books, building our stamina, and monitoring our engagement with our characters. We've explored several books about United States Flag and Anthem, the Constitution, and our Pledge of Allegiance. We analyzed the meaning of the words, the symbolism, and the document's contents. We examined the SAY (What they are/what we see), the MEAN (the meaning behind, the meaning )of, the sacrifice and thought put into them) and the MATTER (Why this is important). We are learning our history not just to check off boxes, but so that we can move forward as active citizens, in mutual respect, investing in our country's founding beliefs into our future. In math, w...

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Thanks for coming to Tuesday's Back to School Night!  We loved seeing everyone together and sharing our passion for this year's Studio SBLC.  If you haven't yet paid enrichment fees online or via check, please do so ASAP so we can order this year's t-shirts. This week the SBLC began a new design project...our outdoor space! After seeing the possibilities come to life inside, the kids are making plans for re-landscaping zones outdoors to make them more learning centered and user-friendly. We needed to hone our map making skills (which works perfectly with math, social studies, and research TEKS)... We applied our knowledge of measurement and used scale to convert our feet to inches in order to create an accurate representation of Mrs. Forrest's side of the Studio. BIG work!   In ELA, we read about landscape architects and designers while refreshing our memory of nonfiction text and text features. We also quickly reviewed some routines for spelling so that w...

Cursive Writing  Use the link above for cursive writing practice at home and during soft start. :)

Our week has been filled with celebration and reflection! The three of us want to express our gratitude for each and every one of you and the contributions you have offered to our SBLC family. We truly have enjoyed every minute of this year. Thank you for all the ongoing support and encouragement. We couldn't have done it without you! We are all excited for the time to relax and recharge this summer.  Thanks for your generous gift - we're all looking forward to some quality time at Travaasa!   Happy summer! Your SBLC coaches   

This week's focus was growth mindset. It was a great review of how to grow our brains and have a positive outlook on mistakes and challenge. In the English Language Arts portion of the “Changemaker Project,” students researched using technology or family interviews. They selected 5 people from their heritage that made contributions in some way to our world. After fact finding, they discerned a precise verb for the action in their story. Using the pattern from the mentor text, So Our Children Can Soar by Michelle Cook, they developed a pattern story in chronological order which portrays each person and their contributions, and how those contributions led to others’ actions in making change in our world. Their pieces end with application to their lives as they illustrated their passion and how they will make change in the future. In the math portion of the “Changemaker” project, students used literary nonfiction and online sources to research famous mathematical changemakers....

This week began with our Third and Fourth Graders showing their hard work during the STAAR reading and math tests. We are so proud of their dedication to their learning all year long, and know that they felt well prepared! This week we've switched focus to our Changemaker Projects. In reading, we have been finding facts about influential people in our heritage that have made our lives possible today. We are creating individual books to celebrate those people, and to show how chronologically they have affected change in our present time. We also have a page that illustrates what/how WE will be changemakers through our lives. It's been exciting to find so many interesting people in our history! In math we've taken some time to make more connections between all of the concepts we studied through the year and how they apply beyond the walls of our classroom.  We're creating a series of posters that will grow as we make more connections these next few weeks.  We're a...

What a fabulous first week of May! We have been focusing on our calming and energizing strategies. We learned a few more ways to use breathing to help us, as well as some cross-the-body movements. We encouraged each other to be aware of opportunities to use these strategies, and have been building in these healthy habits. In ELA, we have finished all our novel studies, and have clamored for "one more book" before the end of the year. We will see!  We've been following our characters so closely -- coming to a close with them has us actually missing them!! We all finished publishing our work for our anthologies as well! Big Work! In math, we've finished a 2-week review of concepts.  It's been exciting to see how many meaningful connections we've discovered between topics and how much our math vocabulary has grown so far this year. We played several team games as part of our review work and decided our favorites were "Mathoo" and "Crumple a...