Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

Check out our new pages! Both are student led and all are student contributions. We are so proud of them and their desire to have a wider audience. Click on the pages above for the Student Perspectives page and the Cohort Press to take a peek at some work. It's a work in progress...plan on seeing more and more there soon! Our focus is poetry this week. We've gathered specific ways to make interpretation easier. We have dug deeper into figurative language as well. It's a stretch to go from literal to figurative meanings, but we are fabulously struggling through it!  In our writing, we've been analyzing sentences where two actions share a subject.  Our social studies work centered around an expository essay about Martin Luther King Jr. In math, we've considered the concepts of area and perimeter from many perspectives. We know that area is the space inside of a 2-dimensional shape and that it's typically measured in square units. Our perimeter investigations t...

Our classroom community came together this week and came up with a new way of taking care of our classroom and materials. They wanted everyone to be more involved, and the teachers wanted to make it an opportunity for students to take more ownership and leadership. They brainstormed, discussed, disagreed politely, ran through possible snags, and let the ideas flow. We now are piloting a new job routine -- ZONES! Each member applied for a zone, and they have a list of tasks to work together to complete. WOW...our classrooms are looking so much cleaner with their buy in!! On Thursday, Fourth Grade took in the exhibits and shows at the Bob Bullock Museum! Thank you to all the fabulous parents who offered to chaperone -- it made it so easy to spread out and see different things, and kept everyone safe! In ELA, we are refining and improving the complexity of our compound sentences -- using commas and conjunctions gives us a way to add variety to our writing...

We have jumped right in with both feet! As much fun as we had over break, it feels great to be back into our routine and catching up. This week we've been working on some renovations and problem solving as an SBLC family. The students are discussing issues with our current job market and the quality of work that's being done to take care of each other, our materials, and our space. They are brainstorming new ways (and jobs) to create better autonomy and accountability. We've also been revisiting the value that mistakes are absolutely necessary in our lives and show that we are growing. In addition, the piece of honesty and vulnerability when you've made mistakes has been addressed. Sometimes a belief that we are "getting out of trouble" or "brushing things under the rug" by not opening up about our mistakes makes a small problem a bigger issue...because it will come up later in one way or another. In ELA, we worked on compound sentence structure ...