Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

  Dear SBLC families,      We are so grateful for all of you! Thanks for the gorgeous rosemary trees and for all of the gift card goodies we found in the branches. Both of us look forward to a little shopping and relaxation over winter break. We loved the chance to visit with you at our winter party and so appreciate all of your contributions to our tasty breakfast buffet and our cute penguin craft.      We were able to fill 7 backpacks as a donation to Carrying Hope. Your generosity will help a lot of kiddos in need of some comfort at a challenging time and we love that our community showed such support!      Here's a glimpse into our week through some fun pictures! Happy Holidays all - see you in January!

What a busy, festive week!  3rd graders enjoyed our field trip to the Long Center for The Nutcracker and graciously posed for a few photos: In science, we finished our class science project notebooks and all students took home this example of a quality science fair notebook.  Each science fair participant also brought home a suggested timeline for managing this project at home, so please ask your scientist about this important tool.  We are excited about your student's ownership of his or her science fair project, and have heard fabulous testable questions and experiment plans.  We've also been herpetologists at work, learning all about our visiting leopard gecko. In math, we've enjoyed conversations about the SBLC economy as we prepare for the first store next week. Students designed currency that reflected SBLC values and our outer space theme, then cast an electronic ballot to vote for their favorite in each denomination. They also calculated the total numb...

We're finally enjoying some cozy December weather this week! We hope you all enjoyed the snow this morning and look forward to hearing snow stories when we all return to class on Monday. In math this week, 4th graders have moved from a concrete to an abstract understanding of long division and are now building fluency with this strategy. We continue to apply division to real world situations and to consider how remainders affect our solutions. 4th graders have also been connecting their fraction and decimal understandings with a decimal number line game and an ongoing visual proof decimal challenge. 3rd graders are becoming financially literate and learning all about economic concepts such as scarcity and the relationship between human capital and potential income. We've have some powerful discussions about planned and unplanned spending decisions, and have enjoyed both online and classroom simulations to bring these concepts to life. We are definitely expanding our vocabul...

We've come back from a wonderful break, refreshed and ready to learn! SBLC students have been hard at work and jumped in with both feet! We hope you enjoyed looking through the portfolios at the halfway point, and it launched some conversations about keeping up the Quality Work they are doing! We've been enjoying the weather via our outdoor space! Lots of fun varying up our learning environment! Our project time has focused on our Service Project for Carrying Hope. Students have learned about the organization and who they help, created a sign up, and are eager to build these important packs to help a child their age. Check your email for a student-designed donation sign up. In ELA, we've been learning how to actively annotate, take notes, cite sources, and summarize text! Our in class research has been supporting our experimentation in science, and has helped us complete our In Class Science Fair Project Notebook. We've been learning about insulators, me...

We've enjoyed such a busy week full of Kiker opportunities!  We learned about the upcoming science fair, watched a fantastic 5th grade play, and participated in Track and Field.  Your students will agree that we're ready for a relaxing Thanksgiving break.  Ms. Fraser reminded us in assembly that we need to be reflective about what we're grateful for every day during this upcoming holiday break.  This habit of gratitude brings us to a more mindful and peaceful state. We've also spent some time this week reflecting on our quality work artifacts as we progress through the second quarter. Students are bringing home their notebooks to share with you.  Please create some time during your Thanksgiving break to celebrate your child's work quality and to discuss areas of growth. SBLC mathematicians all reflected on the importance of math fact fluency.  Now that we find ourselves using multidigit multiplication and division frequently as useful tools, it's labori...

Students, explore the link below to complete the Kiker science fair scavenger hunt in class today: http://kikersciencefair2018.weebly.com/  

We are so excited about our outdoor space!  Thanks to all who supported this process with materials, donations, and gifts of time.  We enjoyed the gorgeous warm weather at the beginning of the week and many of us came outside for our landing reflection time.  Smiles all around... SBLC mathematicians learned some important calculation strategies this week.  3rd graders reviewed how to multiply using partial products and created their own visual proofs.  Then we used our deep understanding of arrays to learn about the standard multiplication algorithm.  With just a little practice so far, we're off to a great start and have even tackled some multidigit multiplication with regrouping. 4th graders are developing a clear understanding of multidigit division. We started the week modeling 3-digit division problems with place value blocks and noticed that we worked most efficiently when we used a pattern of dividing, multiplying, and subtracting to record ho...

As we move into the second nine weeks, it's the perfect time to reestablish expectations about quality work. SBLC teachers listed their responsibilities, from delivering effective instruction to checking for understanding and providing examples of quality work. With each of the teacher expectations, students considered and listed their responsibilities as active, engaged learners.  We created a contract to demonstrate our commitment to producing quality work and are excited about how this increased awareness of the learning process is deepening our understanding. Thanks for engaging in this important conversation with your student at home and for supporting his or her ownership of the learning process. We've already received positive feedback from two parents. One commented, "This is great! I know my student is clear on what is expected and can't say, 'I didn't understand,' when turning in graded work. They know they should ask questions in the process of...

Rowan and Caroline present their project at Kiker morning assembly. This week we continued our work on our Voice and Choice projects. It's exciting to see the pursuit of understanding important issues, and what we each can do to inspire change. Rowan and Caroline have been learning to put faces to the concern of bullying, and Ms. Fraser invited them to use their information to create a presentation for AISD's Unity Day. They did a fantastic job creating a Google Slide presentation. Their word choices and images kept Kiker's entire student body quiet and listening to what they had to share. In ELA, we created our very first independent outline for our Expository writing. Our writing community recognized that it was an opportunity to put Say, Mean, Matter into effect, and how easy it was to organize. We've been analyzing compound sentences with multiple predicates and conjunctions. In addition, we are honing our accuracy skills with spelling and complete s...

Beautiful weather, fabulous fall! This week our learners have been hard at work using nonfiction signposts with our social studies text. We've been looking at it with a questioning stance, and coming up with BIG questions. As Rowan put it so wisely, "How does this affect our classroom? How is it changing what I am learning?" She's already internalized what we are all developing in ourselves as readers -- read widely, and know that there are many, many different versions to actively consider to understand a subject deeply. We are discovering things about the Native American tribes here in Texas, and how they lived/adapted to each region of Texas. In ELA, we continue our journey with Alex in Eleven.  We are really taking steps to further grasp the theme of each and every chapter, and how those synthesize to become an overall author's purpose and overall theme. We use our text every week to explore multi meaning vocabulary, sentence structure, and as a base fo...

Thanks for meeting with us over these past few weeks! We have enjoyed getting together as a team and finding areas where we can continue to support these amazing learners! This week we've embarked on an exciting journey! We are developing projects which we feel we have a voice/passion for to investigate and to communicate about. It's exciting to see our SBLC citizens thinking about a deep question and how they can research, innovate, and inspire change. In ELA, we've moved forward with our analysis of character in that we are nearing the climax of the book. We've been examining our character's actions and noticed that changes are happening, yet our author, Tom Rogers, has left us with enough unknowns to keep us wondering. With that, it is essential that we cite text evidence to support our ideas, thinking, and further questions. We are walking through each piece together as guided practice, and then challenged to take these skills into our independent reading. I...

Happy weekend!  We'll see many of you on Monday and Wednesday next week as we continue with fall conferences.  Thanks for checking the sign-up page for your slot and being mindful of our busy schedule.   Your SBLC student is coming home with portfolios of their work from the first 7 weeks of school.  They have taken time to reflect on their progress and further growth opportunities, and are excited to present this body of work to you.  Thank you for valuing this hard work and for using the blue forms as a tool to guide your conversation and your feedback. We use these notebooks daily, so please make sure your student can bring them back to school on Tuesday morning. SBLC mathematicians have been exploring multiplication in lots of ways this week.  Third graders are exploring multiples and using hundreds charts to study patterns as they skip count.  We've all been using compatible numbers to more flexibly and efficiently multiply by 3, 4, and 5...