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Rainy Field Trips, Playground Redesign

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 espn video highlighting Robert Mendez. He's a coach out in California making an impact on and off the field who happens to have been born without arms and legs. Incredibly inspiring.

Science and math were integrated through much of this week. We wrapped up our experiment and proved that soil with larger particles drains water faster. We represented results in a table and by creating graphs. Through the rest of the week we moved into financial literacy and learned all about the concept of budgeting. Our Wednesday POD (problem of the day) was all about a monthly budget and calculating expenses. This prepared us to finish our playground redesign maps and our $1,500 budget for planters, benches, and pavers. We honed our measurement skills and balanced our budgets, with lots of opportunities for using all 4 operations along the way!

4th grade ended the week at Slaughter Creek, where they enjoyed 4 stations with Keep Austin Beautiful. They built and launched native seedballs, learned about protecting our watershed, enjoyed a scavenger hunt, and collected macroinvertebrates. It was a bit chilly, but lots of fun. Here are just a few pics of our 4th graders in action:









Thanks for reading and have a fantastic weekend!
Jen and Jewellyn


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