Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

It's been a wet, short week! Lots of indoor recess, puddles, and opportunities to see weather in action! In ELA, we've been developing our agility as writers. We are becoming more purposeful in all we put down on the paper, considering our readers with each work and mark. This knowledge of how to write is transferring to our reading as well, looking for clues through punctuation, capitalization, and word choice for the author's intended meaning. We've started an expository essay about a person we'd like to meet and why -- they have such unique ideas! We've also been practicing some test taking strategies for our multiple choice section of the April 4th Grade Writing STAAR, and we are getting comfortable for that upcoming opportunity. Those readers who completed at least 8 of the Texas Bluebonnets had a chance to celebrate! We'd love to have 100% attending next year.  The new list is out, and can be found at 2018-19 Bluebonnet List We're completin...

It's been a fun, busy week! We all enjoyed our Valentine's day breakfast and the time spent sharing valentines with each other. Thanks to all who provided food and supplies for our celebration! We created tessellation coloring pages for our kindergarten buddies last week and had the opportunity to deliver them on Tuesday morning. It was definitely a highlight of the week to teach our buddies the names and attributes of the 2-dimensional shapes we've been studying in class. In math, we finished our tessellation exploration and reflected on our deeper understanding of 2-D shape attributes. We created small, colorful versions of our favorite tessellations to hang on our classroom ceiling. We spent the second half of the week investigating equilateral triangles and using them to construct polyiamonds. A polyiamond is a shape made by placing equilateral triangles base to base, and we found out that there are many configurations of tetriamonds, pentiamonds, and hexiamon...

It's hard to believe that we're already so far into the 3rd nine weeks and that we're evaluating progress since fall conferences! Your student has 2 copies of the spring conference form and a cover letter in his or her red folder this weekend. Please read the cover letter carefully, as it contains many details to streamline this process. SBLC mathematicians have been exploring 2-dimensional shapes. We started by classifying 2-D shapes into many different categories according to their attributes. We found that a square "gets into all the clubs" because it's a polygon, quadrilateral, parallelogram, rectangle, and rhombus. We then applied our knowledge of 2-D shapes by creating tessellations. A tessellation is an arrangement of 2-dimensional shapes that repeat to cover a space. After studying some beautiful tessellation examples, we created our own examples. We discovered that sides need to connect precisely and that all of the interior angles that connect at a...

We love Texas history! YEE HAW! 4th Grade's field trip was very informative, and we really enjoyed the 4D and IMAX movies too. Seeing the artifacts in person took our learning to a new level. It was great to see the engagement and "I remember learning about this!" moments. Thanks again to the parents who guided and chaperoned! We are actively applying our Texas history in our vignettes of the Texas Revolution! We've completed our research and planned our characters via Google Slides. Next week, we will take this information and incorporate it into a first person narrative in that time period. This project works our reading, and writing muscles and brings our history to life.  We've been focusing on developing ideas with relevant details. We have an analogy of a story as a walk. You want each detail to move the story forward, to build upon the prior sentences. Sidestepping is saying the same thing in different words, and taking a step back may b...