Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

This week has been wonky! A four-day week, Fourth Grade NAEP testing, Fourth Grade Field Trip to the Watershed... BUT -- a great week to create blueprints! We examined professional landscape designs and creating plans with a budget! They selected researched items and decided on how many of each and their placement, but more than that, they calculated cost with a subtotal, figured tax, and then found their total -- which had to be below their budget of $1,500.00. WOW! Big work. Authentic work. Students voted for the top 3 plans and will present them to Kiker campus next week for data collection and feedback from the greater community. In ELA and reading, we've had some extra time with small groups. We have been covering sentence structure deeply, and we are practicing for it to become habit. We've continued our unit on Understanding Differences. We began our novel, Out of My Mind, and are getting to know our characters well. We also saw a select portion of an e...

This week has FLOWN! Unfortunately, we've been hit hard by some illness -- we've been reminding them to wash hands frequently, not share pencils, and to otherwise make sure they are taking care of one another. Hopefully this long weekend will get us all healthy again. Teachers are deep cleaning and Cloroxing to make sure the space is unwelcoming to germs! Valentine's Day was a huge success! It was so neat to see how they really wanted to express genuine care for one another. There were so many, "Thanks friend!" and "Those are so cool!" We enjoyed more yogurt parfaits and juice, along with all the mailing fun. So much creativity in their boxes and their Valentine's Cards! Thanks to all who donated time and resources to make it happen. In reading we've begun our new novel, Out of My Mind. Our character, Melody, was born with Cerebral Palsy and cannot move her body or communicate verbally. In the first chapter, we learned ab...

And with all that change, we learn to be flexible. To adapt. We had a wonky week full of schedule and routine changes that didn't end until Friday! Fourth grade showed their stamina and effort with Benchmarks on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, we rehearsed for our visit from administration to present our findings and suggestions on how the SBLC suggests we redesign the playground near the portables. On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Crissey, Ms. Chapa-Moore, and Ms. Samon were an attentive audience for our presenters and researchers. They gave us great feedback, and set us on to our next steps. If any of you know architects/landscape designers, we could use your expertise in the next few weeks. We will also be working within a budget, so we will be flexing our financial literacy muscles. In our Humanities class, we continue our pursuit of poetry as we enter our new unit, "Understanding Differences." We've begun by exploring ourselves -- the outer traits, which we let/kno...

We've got some new authors on our Perspectives page...enjoy! We've also begun a project that will benefit all of Kiker -- our playground space! We've been writing expository essays describing the problems we have with a growing community and shrinking play area. We have also been brainstorming some possible solutions that will be proposed to Mr. Crissey, the PTA, and Kiker's Beautification Committee. It's empowering to see our problem solving abilities come together to make something better. Be on the lookout for ways to contribute to this plan! This week we've focused on interpreting poetry. It's been exciting to learn not only how to find deeper meaning when we read figurative language, but to also have the ability to incorporate it into our own work! We saw a jump in our readers' interest as they read our newly revised details in our most recent expository outlines. We've wrapped up our Martin Luther King Jr./Civil Rights Movement study with...