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Launching into a new Project!

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On Tuesday, 4th grade attended the Austin Symphony at the Long Center. Music, singing, and a bus ride all gussied up -- what could be better?!

In all subjects, we have been examining what it means to understand our learning on a surface, deep, and transfer level. We are looking at our work not as a grade, but as an opportunity to evaluate how well we know the LEARNING intentions.

There's a big difference between completing an assignment and really UNDERSTANDING what the concepts are in the task.

In ELA we have been looking at Word Work with those levels in mind. We've recognized that we need to put full effort into our centers -- the whole 15 minutes -- to really be practicing the words or language skill. We will be sending notebooks home soon -- you will see a marked difference!

We have also been honing our skills with determining importance with our 5 word strategy. It's a tough one -- only choosing 5 words that are important to the section is challenging, but pushing us to really think about the subheadings.

SBLC mathematicians are busy collecting, representing, and analyzing data. Statistics and data literacy are such important ways to use numbers and we're off to a big start this week. Comparing and contrasting types of data representation allowed us to notice key features of each graph genre. As 3rd and 4th graders, we need to become experts in frequency tables, bar graphs, pictographs, dot plots, and stem-and-leaf plots. Students gave input about their curiosities and we'll find out lots more about each other as we grow in our understanding of these different ways to organize and represent data. As part of our time capsule project, each student will collect meaningful data and choose the best tools for representing their data. You can ask your student about today's shoe size frequency table and dot plot -- how did the various representations help the reader understand the data? Which showed each data point and which clustered the data? Where do we see representations of data around us?

Our time capsule project is in full swing! We have had an expert photographer give us sage advice, and taken that advice to the streets! Volunteers helped us take our own digital image of the artifact we chose to represent a group at Kiker in our time capsule. In addition, on Friday we had an expert writer and statistician came in to help us further our understandings and answer questions. THANKS to all who came out to help!!

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