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Short and sweet!

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 completing the final steps of our Vignettes, and will finish our Historical Album next week. Pictures to come! Also in social studies, we've been ranking the grievances that the Texians named in the Texas Declaration of Independence, We also considered whether we would value those same grievances the same way today!

3rd grade mathematicians have become quite the experts on quadrilaterals! They know that we use sides and angles to classify and are able to apply their knowledge of 2-D shapes to many different contexts. We moved into a 3-D shape review by midweek and studied an assortment of examples, finding patterns and grouping in many different ways. Our discussions also led us to sharpen our definitions of important shape vocabulary like "vertex" and "edge".

4th graders have such geometry knowledge at this point, so we used all of our schema to solve unknown angle measure puzzles. These involve many levels of logical and algebraic reasoning, plus some persistence and attention to detail. They're also really fun!  We enjoyed these puzzles so much that many of us created our own puzzles, then switched with a friend and solved each other's. We also reviewed protractor strategies and explored triangle classification. Lots packed into a short week!

We all analyzed weather patterns as meteorologists this week, noticing clouds and wind direction. We used helpful online resources like weather.com and observed how quickly water accumulated around the Kiker landscape. This led to all sorts of questions about flooding and what an impervious layer means. We have lots to discover when we see each other again next week!

Stay dry and have a great weekend!




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