Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

Our last week together has been an amazing way to finish out our year. We are so grateful for each relationship built, each child and family in our rooms this year. Whether you are a continuing member or you have "graduated" on to new things, you will always be part of the SBLC. Our trip to the park was fantastic today -- the weather cooperated, and we enjoyed games and food galore! Thanks to all who contributed and organized to make today a wonderful experience for all. We both want to say a personal word of thanks for your generous end of year gifts. As we use our gift cards we will be reminded of your thoughtfulness! Happy Summer to all -- see you at the pool (or HEB, or the library, or...) Best, Jennifer and Jewellyn

We were so proud of our SBLC Kiker talent show participants! The first annual Kiker talent show was a fabulous celebration of creativity, courage, and effort. Audience members and performers alike enjoyed the experience and many of our students are already planning their auditions for next year. In science, every student has become an expert on at least one organism in our terrariums or aquariums. Each scientist learned all about his or her organism, annotated text, and then considered what he or she learned. Then each created a mini poster to inform others about the organism. This week's gallery walk was a powerful opportunity for us to learn from each other and to make authentic text-world connections. Mathematicians calculated homework averages for the last 9 weeks and are using these last few days to finish numerical fluency and logical reasoning puzzles like Tile Math. Many are close to reaching their goal, and all have improved in their persistence over the year. We also ...

and heading into the last stretch! This week has been applying our strategies to longer pieces of text. It's amazing how using as few as 5 words per subheading for a nonfiction article is enough to help us piece together an overall summary! They're experts now! We've been working on some poetry as well (hope you enjoy!), and progressing on our individual pieces. The application continued into our math block, with lots of group games and partner opportunities designed to keep our neurons strong across topics. We know that slowing down, rereading for full comprehension, annotating our noticings, and showing all parts of our written pathway all support attention to detail and accuracy. Our mathematicians have come so far this year and they're ready to show what they know next week! Our last project of the year has us working in groups to create a game involving an SEL theme of choice. Their energy is amazing and they don't want to stop! It's neat hearing th...

Luckily, April showers bring May flowers, right? We've been lucky to get outside at recess, so the rain has not deterred us! :) This week, we focused our responses in nonfiction on composing a summary with our 5 key word strategy. Students employed this with a longer piece of text, and enjoyed discussion on finding the best summary statement for each subsection of the article. We also explored Social Emotional Themes that they felt resounded from 8 different read aloud opportunities. We are using these to formulate ideas for a theme for our new project: creating board games! We've also celebrated the wide variety of topics we've covered as mathematicians so far this year. We continue to notice meaningful connections between topics and worked this week to apply our understanding across a variety of contexts. Our neural connections weaken when we haven't thought about a topic for awhile, and this week we could almost feel our neurons getting strong again as we reconsi...