Happy Plants on the Porch!

We know that Austin has seen an unusual amount of rainfall this past few weeks -- we've had some crazy dismissals and dashes to Special areas -- and our plants are LOVING IT!

We enjoyed seeing so many of you at Back to School Night and giving you some "whys" behind all we do as a community each day in the SBLC!

Last Saturday, both teachers had the opportunity to hear Justice Sotomayor in Austin. She's written a new children's book about her life thus far. Two of our SBLC family members had a chance to go as well! We explored her memoir this week and looked at how her metaphors for books guided our imagery and understanding of her life.

We also began a nonfiction text, Her Right Foot, which focuses on a portion of the Statue of Liberty that most don't ever consider -- her feet. We are curious to understand why she has broken chains surrounding them! More to come about that as we finish the book next week.

In ELA our focus continued on capitalizing -- this time, titles. We are piecing together why every letter, every mark, on the page affects everything! Your reader understands what you've written by what they see on the page -- even the smallest comma or apostrophe can make a huge difference..so we know there's a lot of power in our choices of what and how we write.

We analyzed an article about the Declaration of Independence. Reading the actual contents of the document gave us a good groundwork on how our country was established. We collaborated in teams to write an "I am" poem using point of view from the Declaration itself, and then each whole block worked to combine it in to one poem.

We used much of our science time this week to share expertise on health topics as part of Kiker's Coordinated School Health (CSH) kick-off. Students created posters to explain/illustrate why sleep, hydration, physical activity, social-emotional learning, and nutrition are important. On Thursday we enjoyed a gallery walk of our informational posters, signed a pledge to CSH, and shared knowledge gained from our discussions this week. We also started exploring how matter can change state when energy is added. More to come on those topics next week...

In math, we've been learning how to round numbers. We've learned that this important estimation skill requires a deep understanding of place value and so we've also spent some time this week reviewing multiples of one thousand, ten thousand, and so on. Our rounding work is most accurate and reflects depth of understanding when we can draw an open number line to represent our reasoning.

In groups, we shared experiences of effective/ineffective collaboration and then considered the importance of each person contributing to the team's process. Each student stepped into a role that added value to his or her team, from the resource manager to the facilitator. Using these roles to lend structure to our collaboration, we tackled a money problem about comparing prices at two different stores. We'll finish and share our pathways next week, but we're already finding that decimals are very handy when you need to explain prices between whole dollars. We also officially started math centers this week, and all students are off to a great start with these important routines!