Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

Cozy nights, good food, and opportunities to share love and laughter with others. Thanks so much from the both of us for your generosity! Mrs. Mangels will be applying it to all the home renovations she's doing, and Mrs. Forrest will be using it to fly out to California to visit her oldest son, Matt. Thank you to everyone who donated time and/or materials to our holiday party. We all had a wonderful time creating and eating together. Good memories we will smile about. We have enjoyed building relationships with you and your kids this first half of the school year, and look forward to those growing in the second half! Relax, rest, and rejuvenate! We will see you in January! Best, Jen and Jewellyn

This week we wrapped up some graded opportunities, and we completed some self reflection and evaluation. We looked at expectations via criteria charts and rubrics to help us identify areas of growth and to set goals. This week Third Grade enjoyed the ballet at Austin's Long Center. The dapper dudes and dazzling damsels watched Act II of The Nutcracker. On Thursday, we attended the Kiker Keynotes' Winter Concert too. It put us in a festive holiday mood! In reading, we have been summarizing Winnie's journey across the Atlantic towards the battlefield with the Corps. She's also winning the hearts of all the soldiers and horses she's meeting. We are analyzing her characteristics and monitoring how situations now are giving us a glimpse into how she will handle future experiences. Expository drafting, editing, and revising are in full swing! We have used model pieces to help us better our writing and evaluate where we are now. Our sentence analysis/grammar have c...

In reading, we've enjoyed Winnie's silly behavior as she becomes a part of Lt. Harry Colbourne's veterinary unit. She's on the train, heading 5,000 miles towards WWI.  Our summaries are becoming more precise, and we are learning the art of paraphrasing to keep it concise. We are using letter form to complete our Literary Responses, so that skill is growing as well. "I love knowing that I can correctly use conversation in my writing!" the SBLC writers declare. They've been honing their skills using quotation marks and the punctuation that corresponds with all the ways you can show characters' words. We continue to refine our expository outlines and pieces as well. We've been exploring the specifics of maps and globes. It's been fun to dig deep into how scale, latitude and longitude, and keys/compass rose help us know where we are in the world. It's been fun to see angles, degrees, and parallel lines from math show up in social studies! ...

What a wonderful week off, and a wonderful week back. We started a new routine this week...writing down a few ideas of the GOOD we saw in our day. Here's a few glimpses: In reading, we have continued to follow Bear's journey from the Woods to Col. Colbourn's acquisition. We are using our signposts to identify more about Bear's character and to find the struggle he faces throughout the book. Our Again and Again signpost has us asking, "Why does this keep coming up?" and leading us to some good predictions. In ELA, we've been practicing more of our grammar with independent and dependent clauses, commas, conjunctions, and now quotation marks! Our writing is growing by leaps and bounds as we are able to craft complex sentences accurately with more confidence. Third grade had a great time at Sauer-Beckmann Farm! We learned about the people and their way of life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It's amazing to see how they have preserv...

This week held some exciting events! Fourth Grade put on their dancing boots and performed their wonderful play THREE times on Thursday! We certainly appreciated all the hard work they put in to making it a spectacular performance! On Friday, we actively enjoyed Kiker's annual Track and Field! It's always such a great day of Team Building and bonding with one another outside the classroom! We were so lucky to have such beautiful weather too -- smiles all around! In reading, we started a new novel, Winnie's Great War . It's a historical fiction piece that gives an account of the real Winnie the Bear, a mascot for a Canadian Brigade in WWI. AA Milne was inspired by this orphaned black bear and his brave adventures to create Winnie the Pooh. It's a neat account based on the author's great-grandfather's diary. We also integrated social studies and nonfiction reading by reading, questioning,and analyzing an article about an inventor...

Fourth Grade had the fabulous experience of the Symphony this week! We enjoyed learning about how music has become more diverse as composers blended different techniques, notes, and rhythm. 3rd grade performed at the Veteran's Day assembly. Thank you to all of our Veterans!  SBLC mathematicians and scientists were busy designing tracks to finish our exploration of kinetic and potential energy, then wrapping up their technical drawings to apply new vocabulary. 3rd grade continues to build multiplication fluency and grow their division muscles with a variety of problem solving contexts. 4th grade is developing a deeper understanding of partial products and different pathways for multidigit multiplication. By week's end, 4th grade connected visual models and the standard algorithm as another efficient strategy for 2-digit by 2-digit multiplication.  We finished A Long Walk to Water  and have learned so many lessons. Salva's a true model of pers...

This week we've worked some agility muscles as our week was peppered with experiences! Book Fair assembly and preview has us excited to get our hands on some new books next week! Oh, and there were those necessary-but-not-loved Flu shots, and of course Halloween (and the day after). Many of our Climbing Guides reflect how we really exercised that Emotional Agility and Resilience! We also added some new plants, soil, and seeds to the keyhole garden. We hope to harvest some kale, cauliflower, and eventually radishes and beets. We'll talk more over the next weeks about compost and its function in the keyhole garden system. In reading block, we've been working together on the research process by digging in to how to find information, read it and annotate thoroughly, and then document and note take. They are ready to be independent in this process for Science Fair and well into their future. They learned the science of making candy (wow -- sugar + specific temperature = all ...

We are so proud of all that we've accomplished in these first 9 weeks! Thanks for making time to look through portfolios last weekend. SBLC scientists have been hard at work applying the scientific method to our study of force and motion. We have used the parts of this process through the year, but put all of the components together into a meaningful whole with our work this week. We know that the scientific method includes an observation about the world around us, framing our curiosities into a testable question, forming a thoughtful hypothesis, collecting results, then using our results to draw conclusions. After observing that different cars traveled different distances, we wondered how the mass of these cars affected the distance traveled. Teams of scientists designed ramps to answer this question, collecting data through multiple trials with pennies to add mass each time. Then we pooled our data to look for meaningful patterns. In math, we've been hard at work with mu...

This weekend your student is bringing home their body of work in their notebooks. They are excited to make an appointment with you this weekend to sit down and talk through each artifact. Students know how to be present and in the moment when they are reflecting here at school. Provide a quiet space and ample time for this.We know this will definitely connect you more to your child and with the exciting learning they are doing. Please fill out your portion of the portfolio reflection and send all notebooks back on Monday. We've explored the idea of acceptance and "widening our world" when we encounter people that are different than we are. We've talked about how noticing and judging are two separate things...and that, when we take the time to know and understand others better, they are oftentimes very much like us and not what we first thought.  We watched a short film, "The Present," where we found ourselves making judgments on first impressions...and the...

We've shown not only emotional agility, but flexibility this week! A short week, picture day, counselor visits...we've had quite a few schedule changes. Students and teachers alike are grateful too, that we had a few days at the end of the week to get out and enjoy the cooler temperatures! On Friday, we enjoyed our first Breakfast and the Paper. It's a unique way to build community by eating together and reading. We know that it creates a warm memory too. SBLC readers have been investing into Salva and Nya's lives. We've been surprised by the difficulties they have endured/faced...and that has caused us to have a new awareness of how others' experiences are so different than ours. We've practiced pausing in different ways to consider the text more deeply. That may mean jotting a note or or sketching an image. We are training ourselves to think past surface level understanding. Readers don't merely consume text, they absorb it and ...