Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

This week we changed the location and style of how we set our intention for the day. Instead of a sentence in our Take Off and Landing Notebooks, you will see one word at the top of every day in our agenda. We talked about how that change will allow us to see our intention several times throughout the day, which will probably help us stay the course on our intentions! In ELA, we finished Malala's book! It's been an amazing journey. It has had us questioning, discussing, wondering, setting personal goals...simply put, a life changer for us as a community.Third Graders have been given instructions for next week's Vocabulary Parade. We will be walking the halls next Friday first thing in the morning, so feel free to join us to view our creativity with words! In social studies, we examined three different genres around the same topic. We learned about Henry "Box" Brown and his incredible sacrifice to escape slavery in 1849. So many questions here too! It brought t...

This week has flown! We began the week with our 4th grade writers working really hard on the writing STAAR. Kudos to them for their determination and for completing the challenge! In ELA, we've had the opportunity to walk further with Malala on her journey. We've heard and discussed some wise words. One that particularly stood out was simple, but so profound. Her doctor said to her, "I believe solutions arrive first, and then problems show up." Wow. To think that things occur in that order is extremely comforting...knowing there is a solution already present to help us work through something hard. A true life lesson.  We've also been talking through the healing process and how miraculous her survival was. She shares her struggle and we can see through her experience how the values in life can change. Before, she banked happiness on being the "top of her class" but now sees her happiness grounded in her true purpose of reaching others with a message o...

This week in project we've been self-reflective about our emotional responses and our amygdala's sensitivity to situations. We are learning how helpful it is to identify what we are feeling. We've also discussed how "growing a longer fuse" is a goal we all have in specific areas of our lives. Learning about how our brain and emotions are linked is so empowering in how we think about things and react! In ELA, we've done some important reviewing of revision and editing. We've examined mentor text to help us craft our own, and we've been making strides to improve our clarity in our expository pieces. Next week 4th Grade will have the chance to reach our readers on the STAAR writing. We know we are ready! In reading, we are anxiously watching how Malala is recovering in England. The questions she poses are causing us to examine what we too feel is truly important and how we react to adversity. SBLC readers are having deep discussions! Ask them what the...

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...

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...