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Owning Our Learning

One of the goals in building confident and competent learners is that they own their learning. What does this mean? It means a few things. We want kids to set goals about what they want and need to learn. Once they do that, learners are monitoring their understanding against those goals, asking for what they need, and practicing until they reach a deep level of understanding.

It was an opportunity this week to take several Benchmarks. We got some practice, but we also were able to pause as we were working to think about areas we feel confident and areas we want to be stronger. Rather than waiting for others to tell them what to work on, they already have goals in  mind. It's empowering!

This week, writers have been penning their vignette narrative poems. They are in all stages of revising, and editing, using helpful feedback. They are learning a lot of Texas history through the eyes of another -- in this case a tree.

We read Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. Jack found his writing voice through a year with Miss Stretchberry in a powerful way. Many of us were touched by the transformation and openness in "his" narrative poems.

We're developing a variety of strategies for comparing fractions through number talks and other problem solving opportunities. As students share their pathways for comparing, we're considering a wide variety of visual strategies and logical reasoning. As strategies are shared, we're able to evaluate as a community of mathematicians which strategies we'd like to remember and use for other problems in the future. We want our learning to deepen so we can transfer our understanding to any type of fraction context. We know we're not there yet...but we all have learning goals to get there!

Our scientists have had such a busy week! We're collecting data from our measurable dependent variable, recording text and visual observations, and considering ways to organize data. We've studied data from several SBLC science projects and are learning to draw conclusions from a body of evidence. It's also been powerful to reflect on how our experiment designs may have had some flaws and could be improved. On Friday, we enjoyed presentations from our Kiker Science Fair participants.

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