Check out our new pages! Both are student led and all are student contributions. We are so proud of them and their desire to have a wider audience. Click on the pages above for the Student Perspectives page and the Cohort Press to take a peek at some work. It's a work in progress...plan on seeing more and more there soon! Our focus is poetry this week. We've gathered specific ways to make interpretation easier. We have dug deeper into figurative language as well. It's a stretch to go from literal to figurative meanings, but we are fabulously struggling through it! In our writing, we've been analyzing sentences where two actions share a subject. Our social studies work centered around an expository essay about Martin Luther King Jr. In math, we've considered the concepts of area and perimeter from many perspectives. We know that area is the space inside of a 2-dimensional shape and that it's typically measured in square units. Our perimeter investigations t...
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Our classroom community came together this week and came up with a new way of taking care of our classroom and materials. They wanted everyone to be more involved, and the teachers wanted to make it an opportunity for students to take more ownership and leadership. They brainstormed, discussed, disagreed politely, ran through possible snags, and let the ideas flow. We now are piloting a new job routine -- ZONES! Each member applied for a zone, and they have a list of tasks to work together to complete. WOW...our classrooms are looking so much cleaner with their buy in!! On Thursday, Fourth Grade took in the exhibits and shows at the Bob Bullock Museum! Thank you to all the fabulous parents who offered to chaperone -- it made it so easy to spread out and see different things, and kept everyone safe! In ELA, we are refining and improving the complexity of our compound sentences -- using commas and conjunctions gives us a way to add variety to our writing...
We have jumped right in with both feet! As much fun as we had over break, it feels great to be back into our routine and catching up. This week we've been working on some renovations and problem solving as an SBLC family. The students are discussing issues with our current job market and the quality of work that's being done to take care of each other, our materials, and our space. They are brainstorming new ways (and jobs) to create better autonomy and accountability. We've also been revisiting the value that mistakes are absolutely necessary in our lives and show that we are growing. In addition, the piece of honesty and vulnerability when you've made mistakes has been addressed. Sometimes a belief that we are "getting out of trouble" or "brushing things under the rug" by not opening up about our mistakes makes a small problem a bigger issue...because it will come up later in one way or another. In ELA, we worked on compound sentence structure ...
Cozy nights, good food, and opportunities to share love and laughter with others. Thanks so much from the both of us for your generosity! Mrs. Mangels will be applying it to all the home renovations she's doing, and Mrs. Forrest will be using it to fly out to California to visit her oldest son, Matt. Thank you to everyone who donated time and/or materials to our holiday party. We all had a wonderful time creating and eating together. Good memories we will smile about. We have enjoyed building relationships with you and your kids this first half of the school year, and look forward to those growing in the second half! Relax, rest, and rejuvenate! We will see you in January! Best, Jen and Jewellyn
This week we wrapped up some graded opportunities, and we completed some self reflection and evaluation. We looked at expectations via criteria charts and rubrics to help us identify areas of growth and to set goals. This week Third Grade enjoyed the ballet at Austin's Long Center. The dapper dudes and dazzling damsels watched Act II of The Nutcracker. On Thursday, we attended the Kiker Keynotes' Winter Concert too. It put us in a festive holiday mood! In reading, we have been summarizing Winnie's journey across the Atlantic towards the battlefield with the Corps. She's also winning the hearts of all the soldiers and horses she's meeting. We are analyzing her characteristics and monitoring how situations now are giving us a glimpse into how she will handle future experiences. Expository drafting, editing, and revising are in full swing! We have used model pieces to help us better our writing and evaluate where we are now. Our sentence analysis/grammar have c...
In reading, we've enjoyed Winnie's silly behavior as she becomes a part of Lt. Harry Colbourne's veterinary unit. She's on the train, heading 5,000 miles towards WWI. Our summaries are becoming more precise, and we are learning the art of paraphrasing to keep it concise. We are using letter form to complete our Literary Responses, so that skill is growing as well. "I love knowing that I can correctly use conversation in my writing!" the SBLC writers declare. They've been honing their skills using quotation marks and the punctuation that corresponds with all the ways you can show characters' words. We continue to refine our expository outlines and pieces as well. We've been exploring the specifics of maps and globes. It's been fun to dig deep into how scale, latitude and longitude, and keys/compass rose help us know where we are in the world. It's been fun to see angles, degrees, and parallel lines from math show up in social studies! ...
What a wonderful week off, and a wonderful week back. We started a new routine this week...writing down a few ideas of the GOOD we saw in our day. Here's a few glimpses: In reading, we have continued to follow Bear's journey from the Woods to Col. Colbourn's acquisition. We are using our signposts to identify more about Bear's character and to find the struggle he faces throughout the book. Our Again and Again signpost has us asking, "Why does this keep coming up?" and leading us to some good predictions. In ELA, we've been practicing more of our grammar with independent and dependent clauses, commas, conjunctions, and now quotation marks! Our writing is growing by leaps and bounds as we are able to craft complex sentences accurately with more confidence. Third grade had a great time at Sauer-Beckmann Farm! We learned about the people and their way of life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It's amazing to see how they have preserv...