Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

We are curious! Curious, inquisitive, watchful, observant... We've been exploring words in our spelling and vocabulary study to expand our understanding of how curiosity drives our learning! In reading, we've dug deeper into the character and setting of Wishtree . We've discovered the importance of STOPPING, pausing, and noticing what we've read. Taking the time to think, theorize, and process is going to make the difference between a surface "it was a good book" to a passionate "WOW! There's so much I want to tell you about this book!" Our writing has taken a new, much improved, slant. We are working to make the focus of the piece not an event -- where writing becomes a list of things done -- to focus on the character. They are learning to show a change, a trait, or something significant about the PERSON. That's the real story. We are revising and editing along the way! We wrapped up our place value unit this week, although we continu...

This week things have been rolling along, and we are now getting into a natural rhythm with our schedule. Readers have been investing in their character Red, in Katherine Applegate's latest novel, Wishtree.  They have been learning about the power of really slowing down and looking at ALL parts of the beginnings of books -- the blurb, the dedication, pictures, poems -- all are crucial parts, and all is done ON PURPOSE by the author. Good readers pay attention to all of that. Red has deemed us trustworthy of an important story, and we are on pins and needles to find out what it is (plus we feel a high responsibility to pay attention and be worthy of this great honor 💓 ). In writing and word work, we have been exploring the power of how sentences are crafted. It's not just about having a capital at the beginning and a punctuation mark at the end. It's also having a subject, a predicate, and organizing all the words to have the impact we desire on the reader. We have work...

This week we finished drafting and creating our Courage Projects. We implemented phrases that have Kind, Specific, and Helpful thoughts to encourage one another to make this clearer for an audience. We also used our rubrics as tools to evaluate where our work was, and we also used those descriptors to help us "level up" and elevate the quality of our work. This week we finished drafting and creating our Courage Projects. We implemented phrases that have Kind, Specific, and Helpful thoughts to encourage one another to make this clearer for an audience. We also used our rubrics as tools to evaluate where our work was, and we used those descriptors to help us "level up" and elevate the quality of our work. In reading, we've been examining characters -- analyzing traits, determining their struggles, and identifying ways they changed. We have been learning to prove our thinking with evidence from the text too. In our word work, we looked at ways soun...

This week we've considered how effort affects everything we do! It affects the quality of our interactions, our levels of understanding, and the quality of our work products. Our effort creates our abilities and it's so empowering to know that we are limitless! We've also spent time this week understanding a variety of tools that help us to improve the quality of our work across subject areas. These include criteria charts, mentor texts, and rubrics. These are powerful tools that elevate the quality of our work all throughout the school year! In math, we've started a place value unit of study. We're learning how to read numbers through the ones, thousands, millions, and billions periods. We celebrated the 10th day of school on Monday by exploring the power of 10. We used an online tool to zoom in and out by multiples of 10, helping us to better conceptualize our base ten place value system. Many students wanted to show parents at home, so here's ...