Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

It's been a quick four days! Our writers have been analyzing mentor text and have been selecting strategies they want to employ in their own pieces! We saw hyperbole, quotations, and even similes in expository pieces. It reminded us to veer from strictly following a format. We enjoyed reading text with voice and style. In reading, we have continued to learn in so many ways from Malala. We are questioning, empathizing, and investing in understanding her experience. She's inspired us in so many ways! We've been looking at short text as well, getting practice for our upcoming fabulous challenge in April and May. As mathematicians, we're learning about the many ways to apply the concepts of area and perimeter. We're building, drawing, and connecting to real-world applications to understand these big ideas. We're ending this short week with some puzzles that require us to apply our UPS check problem-solving process and to apply a deep understanding of area ...

Welcome back! We hope all had a wonderful week off. We are so glad to be together as a learning community again! Third Grade visited the Capitol on Monday. We saw many neat exhibits and saw first hand where lawmakers work here in Austin. Our historians saw primary sources that we've studied...it's exciting to recognize the painting of Santa Anna's surrender as soon as we walked through the south doors! In ELA and reading, we are working on some test preparation skills. It looks different than our every day notebook work, so Mrs. Forrest is taking some time to have us practice those discreet test taking skills. We continue to read Malala's story, and we are captivated by her bravery. SBLC mathematicians started the week giving and receiving feedback on our data representations. We are working to understand how clear labels, titles, and even the type of graph all affect how our audience understand the data. Based on feedback, students revised to improve ...

We're finishing strong with the 3rd quarter of the year! SBLC students took time to reflect on topics studied, artifacts created, and overall quality of work in portfolios. They're proud of how understanding has grown across subject areas and they're excited to share notebooks with you. In math, students have chosen a real-world data set that is meaningful and interesting to them. After organizing data in a frequency table, they're choosing from a menu of different graph representations. These include bar graphs, pictographs, line plots, or stem-and-leaf plots. Students are realizing the different types of data that these various types of graphs best represent, and then choosing one type of graph to best display their data set. This project has truly been a process where students developed and shared areas of expertise, especially when many of us chose to create our final graphs using online tools. We'll share our final graphs when we return from spring break, but...

We are so proud of our fabulous Mrs. Forrest today! We know how inspirational she is to all of us in the SBLC family every day, and it's exciting to see how her words and ideas are affecting others across Texas. She was nominated a few months ago for the HEB teacher of excellence award and found out this morning that she is one of 5 elementary finalists for the state of Texas. We enjoyed a surprise visit from the HEB team this morning so Mrs. Forrest could hear the exciting news. At this stage of the contest, she received both a personal check for $1000 and a $1000 check for the Kiker campus. Such an exciting way to start the week! 

In ELA, we've continued to refine our expository writing and hone our mechanics. We've used our Vignette in social studies as an opportunity to revise with precision for an audience, and our final product is in process! We continue to talk about accuracy as a writer's responsibility to their reader. If the reader isn't clear or can't understand, that's our job as writers to clear up, not the reader's job to figure out! If you see written inaccuracies, use cues like, "What do you mean here? I'm confused as a reader," to have them go back and fix. Try to steer away from, "I see some corrections you need to make." That won't be specific enough for them. They know what they meant to write, and in their heads it sounds perfectly clear. Tell them where you are confused as a reader and need help understanding. I guarantee they will jump in to revise it! In reading we are making our way through I Am Malala, and we are grappling with t...

It's been a wet, short week! Lots of indoor recess, puddles, and opportunities to see weather in action! In ELA, we've been developing our agility as writers. We are becoming more purposeful in all we put down on the paper, considering our readers with each work and mark. This knowledge of how to write is transferring to our reading as well, looking for clues through punctuation, capitalization, and word choice for the author's intended meaning. We've started an expository essay about a person we'd like to meet and why -- they have such unique ideas! We've also been practicing some test taking strategies for our multiple choice section of the April 4th Grade Writing STAAR, and we are getting comfortable for that upcoming opportunity. Those readers who completed at least 8 of the Texas Bluebonnets had a chance to celebrate! We'd love to have 100% attending next year.  The new list is out, and can be found at 2018-19 Bluebonnet List We're completin...

It's been a fun, busy week! We all enjoyed our Valentine's day breakfast and the time spent sharing valentines with each other. Thanks to all who provided food and supplies for our celebration! We created tessellation coloring pages for our kindergarten buddies last week and had the opportunity to deliver them on Tuesday morning. It was definitely a highlight of the week to teach our buddies the names and attributes of the 2-dimensional shapes we've been studying in class. In math, we finished our tessellation exploration and reflected on our deeper understanding of 2-D shape attributes. We created small, colorful versions of our favorite tessellations to hang on our classroom ceiling. We spent the second half of the week investigating equilateral triangles and using them to construct polyiamonds. A polyiamond is a shape made by placing equilateral triangles base to base, and we found out that there are many configurations of tetriamonds, pentiamonds, and hexiamon...