Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

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...