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Quality Work

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 learning!" Another asked, "Can we have a copy of this to review when portfolios come home? We could use it as a checklist to see which areas he did or what he can work on." Great suggestion! We will do just that!

SBLC mathematicians continue to deepen their understanding of subtraction and place value strategies. Each student is drafting a letter to second graders that explicitly teaches estimation, regrouping, multidigit subtraction, and checking with addition. This is big work and their first drafts reflect attention to detail and a commitment to quality work for their second grade audience.  All of us agree that we wish we'd had such a deep understanding of subtraction with regrouping as second graders and feel proud to share our expertise. We'll create final copies and assemble our book next week.

In science, we've become electrical engineers for the week and have constructed a variety of simple circuits. We know that circuit components include a source of energy, a receiver, and a pathway for electrons to flow. In order to communicate about our circuits, we created schematic diagrams using symbols and even constructed conductor detectors to help us classify insulators and conductors. We finished our week's work constructing electromagnets, but want to continue this investigation with some fresh D-cell batteries in the weeks to come.



Our community of readers finished our journey with our character Alex in Eleven. Along the way, we have done amazing analysis through examining character traits, prediction, text evidence, and individual chapter summarization. This week, we've synthesized the ideas and focused on themes and author's purpose. We've really connected with this book, and it will be a hard act to follow! We've been tying our reading to our writing too, creating outlines of our very own in expository essays.

In Social Studies, we've created and built artifacts to represent the Native American tribe we studies in partnerships. We are getting ready to use our outdoor timeline to represent Texas, US, and Kiker history -- it's going to be exciting to use our outdoor space to display our learning!

Our Voice and Choice projects are in full swing as well! We are gathering our research and looking at the data coming in on each of our topics.

Have a fabulous weekend!

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