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Working Hard!

We eagerly participated in our Student Council Elections. It was exciting to exercise our citizenship in our Kiker Community! We also enjoyed a fabulous concert by our Kiker Keynotes in recognition for the sacrifice and bravery of our country's veterans.

Book Fair has been in full swing, and we've picked up some new reading material!

Second grade has been conducting an author study of Kevin Henkes and learning to watch for signposts in his work. Signposts are places where the author has placed events where we need to stop as readers, notice what's happening in regards to our character, and ask ourselves questions to comprehend deeply. We've been drafting a new sensory description poem for our anthologies.

Third Graders have finished up our novel, A Long Walk to Water. It was amazing to feel our reading/learning community come together over this book! They are forever changed by knowing the incredible journey of Salva Dut, and the scarcity of water resources in Africa. We're working on summarization as well as creating multiple ways to show our understanding.

Fourth Graders are absolutely passionate about their character vignettes. We've been in the process of finishing and critique, and are so proud of the depth of their learning. They are authors, but more than that, they are sharing someone's story. We continue to work on comprehension strategies and expository writing as well.

Second grade mathematicians are really working their subtraction muscles lately.  We've used number lines, cubes, and games to practice using known addition facts to subtract.  We've also used 10 as a compatible number to help.  For example, 14-8 becomes 14-4=10, then subtract 2 more to get to 8.  This strategy helps develop our number sense as well as numerical fluency.

Third graders are hard at work with multiplication strategies.  This week we developed strategies for facts using Greg Tang's rhyming book The Best of Times.  One of our favorites was that we can multiply by a factor of ten by "adding zero to the end."  This helped us move into calculating larger products with multidigit factors.  We'll continue with this big work next week.

Fourth graders have been exploring long division strategies in a variety of ways.  We've modeled with base-ten blocks, used partial quotients, and started using the standard algorithm with a musical twist.  We're also creating updated versions of a division book called The Doorbell Rang.  Our books include long division problems where pickles, cupcakes, and even legos are shared among groups of friends.  Next week we'll solve each other's problems and enjoy our creative story problems!

Enjoy the weekend,
Your SBLC coaches

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