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Entrepreneurs at Work

Financial literacy is in full swing in the SBLC this week!  Second graders learned about goods and services, then created corporations to produce a good.  Many 3rd and 4th graders have been helping with production, providing support as accountants, and giving feedback about products.  It's all hands on deck as we prepare for next Wednesday's Kiker Second Grade Market Day.  If you'd like, stop by the Kiker cafe between 8:30 and 9:30 to do a little holiday shopping.  All of our second grade proceeds go to Austin Pets Alive and other nonprofit organizations.  Watch for more info in the Kiker Comments and enjoy these pics of SBLC entrepreneurs:





















In math, second graders are exploring strategies for multidigit subtraction.  This work requires so many of their skills - decomposing numbers flexibly, visualizing place value, calculating the subtraction answer, and checking with addition.  It takes time to fully understand and independently solve, but we are off to a great start!

Third graders are using multiplication and division in lots of ways.  We've calculated ways to organize our class into equal groups and considered how often remainders happen in real life division situations.  We played a fun division modeling game called Leftovers and have been practicing how to use multiplication to solve division equations.

Fourth graders began the week with some fraction folding challenges.  They needed to create shapes that were fractions of the original shape and be able to prove to their skeptical peers that the shape matched the criteria.  This expectation to justify reasoning in order to convince a skeptic pushed us to explain our ideas more clearly.  We'll continue to compare, add, and subtract fractions next week.

 

 

 



Second Grade has been honing their sleuthing skills by using contextual clues to figure unknown or tricky words. They have also been summarizing text, using CSERT to help them focus on the important aspects of a book rather than retelling the whole story. Our Diamante Poems made it into final draft form in our anthologies too! We've been enjoying using whisper phones as a tool to monitor our own fluency in independent reading.

Third Grade have been annotating our novel, noting the author's use of figurative language and focusing on inference. They have been hard at work on developing ideas in writing and using description to add detail, rather than simply adding more information. This focuses the writing and keeps us in a small moment instead of a large, broad stretch of time. We've been using those descriptions to draft a new narrative. We also put our Diamante Poems into final draft form and in our anthologies.

Fourth Grade. Wow. They are deep into the characters and complexities of our novel. Salt to the Sea has introduced us to multifaceted motivations and writing where there are four perspectives on the same moment. We have been summarizing, analyzing, and evaluating the actions of each of our characters, as well as learning so many historical facts about 1944. We've been reviewing compound and complex sentences, grammar, and expository development in writing.

In social studies, second grade entrepreneurs used literature to guide them in their upcoming business venture. After reading Lemonade For Sale, we identified characteristics of successful teams and have been applying those ideas within our own corporations. Many of us have realized that being business takes careful planning and teamwork! We can't wait for Market Day to see the results of our efforts.

Third grade had an especially busy week! As mentors and members of second grade's corporations, we reviewed entrepreneurial ideas and used Lemonade to identify possible opportunities to problem-solve within our corporation teams.

On Wednesday, we had the opportunity to see Act II of The Nutcracker Ballet at the Long Center. We represented Kiker and the SBLC well as true ladies and gentlemen. A little bit of bus silliness is okay, though...

























Third grade wrapped up the week with some computer science. We learned how to code within the world of some of our favorite characters (Star Wars, Minecraft, and Moana to name a few), The link can be found here and also under the Academic Extensions section on the right side of this page. Second and fourth graders will be coding next week.





Fourth grade spent the week researching and synthesizing information about American Indian tribes in Texas. Their brochures and presentations describe features of each tribe, how they used the resources around them, and which tribe they would join if they were alive during that time. The effort of these historians is evident!





Have a fabulous weekend!
Team SBLC

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