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Before We Break for Spring...

It's been a busy week! Fourth and second graders had fun field trips (and don't forget...our third graders will be going  to the State Capitol on Monday, March 23).

All of us had the privilege of attending our own Brass Ensemble Concert! The brass section of the Austin Symphony visited us Tuesday morning and shared some fun tunes with us.


In math fourth graders learned formulas to find the perimeter and area of a shape. We also started on a swimming pool project. First, they designed their own swimming pool then they will spend time finding the area of their swimming pool. Third graders learned about congruent figures, 3-D solid figures, and how to find the area of a shape. Second graders worked on subtracting 3-digit numbers and solving subtraction and addition story problems. They also learned a strategy called break-apart for adding three digit numbers.

Second Grade has been hard at work! We've added some skills to Mountain Language: prefixes and suffixes, categorizing, vowel sounds, and blends. We completed an expository piece together, and are learning how to organize by outlining. Our books this week focused on the historical period of Segregation. Through these books, we learned facts about the time, but also used inferring, analyzing, and interpretation to go deep. We even learned symbolism!!

Third Grade is delving into poetry. Lots of interpretation, inference, and analyzing! We have honed our skills with figurative language, and compared poems using a common theme. We even compared them to a nonfiction piece! Expository was our focus as well, which was challenging, but we are persevering and getting our feet wet!

Fourth Grade is eagerly preparing for our STAAR Writing, which takes place on the 30th and 31st. They've been analyzing good work, editing, revising, and refining our own narrative and expository pieces. We are ready!! We also started a book about WWII, this time based in Europe. We are only on Chapter 3, but have identified themes and created theories through the signposts we see already!

Before we finished our Weather Unit, we enjoyed seeing Kiker's own weather station at work.


Luckily, we had plenty of precipitation to measure thanks to all our recent rain!



Our fourth graders had a fantastic time on our Keep Austin Beautiful field trip. During our visit to the Water Quality Protection site, we checked the quality of the water based on the type of macroinvertebrates present in Slaughter Creek. We loved identifying all the organisms we caught!




Our scavenger hunt gave us to the opportunity to apply our observation skills! We searched for--and discovered--fossils, scat, invasive plants, and animal tracks (among many other things).

We got in touch with our inner botanists to identify seeded plants, discuss how those seeds may be dispersed, and then scattered some of our own in the form of seed balls.

Ask your botanist about the ingredients for a seed ball...

...which can get messy but oh, so fun...

...especially when you get to hurl them into an open field!


Although all land is part of a watershed, this model was cool because it showed the watershed WE are a part of! Here we are demonstrating how water moves, the type of pollution that can affect it, and how we can positively make an impact on water quality.



Second grade had a great time viewing the humpback whale IMAX at Bob Bullock today.





 We also got to check out some of the exhibits while we were there.



A gorgeous day for another learning excursion!


Whatever plans your upcoming week include, we send smiles your way!

Enjoy the break!
Your SBLC Trio

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