Kiker's Strength-Based Learning Cohort

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 e...

This week has FLOWN! Unfortunately, we've been hit hard by some illness -- we've been reminding them to wash hands frequently, not share pencils, and to otherwise make sure they are taking care of one another. Hopefully this long weekend will get us all healthy again. Teachers are deep cleaning and Cloroxing to make sure the space is unwelcoming to germs! Valentine's Day was a huge success! It was so neat to see how they really wanted to express genuine care for one another. There were so many, "Thanks friend!" and "Those are so cool!" We enjoyed more yogurt parfaits and juice, along with all the mailing fun. So much creativity in their boxes and their Valentine's Cards! Thanks to all who donated time and resources to make it happen. In reading we've begun our new novel, Out of My Mind. Our character, Melody, was born with Cerebral Palsy and cannot move her body or communicate verbally. In the first chapter, we learned ab...

And with all that change, we learn to be flexible. To adapt. We had a wonky week full of schedule and routine changes that didn't end until Friday! Fourth grade showed their stamina and effort with Benchmarks on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, we rehearsed for our visit from administration to present our findings and suggestions on how the SBLC suggests we redesign the playground near the portables. On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Crissey, Ms. Chapa-Moore, and Ms. Samon were an attentive audience for our presenters and researchers. They gave us great feedback, and set us on to our next steps. If any of you know architects/landscape designers, we could use your expertise in the next few weeks. We will also be working within a budget, so we will be flexing our financial literacy muscles. In our Humanities class, we continue our pursuit of poetry as we enter our new unit, "Understanding Differences." We've begun by exploring ourselves -- the outer traits, which we let/kno...

We've got some new authors on our Perspectives page...enjoy! We've also begun a project that will benefit all of Kiker -- our playground space! We've been writing expository essays describing the problems we have with a growing community and shrinking play area. We have also been brainstorming some possible solutions that will be proposed to Mr. Crissey, the PTA, and Kiker's Beautification Committee. It's empowering to see our problem solving abilities come together to make something better. Be on the lookout for ways to contribute to this plan! This week we've focused on interpreting poetry. It's been exciting to learn not only how to find deeper meaning when we read figurative language, but to also have the ability to incorporate it into our own work! We saw a jump in our readers' interest as they read our newly revised details in our most recent expository outlines. We've wrapped up our Martin Luther King Jr./Civil Rights Movement study with...

Check out our new pages! Both are student led and all are student contributions. We are so proud of them and their desire to have a wider audience. Click on the pages above for the Student Perspectives page and the Cohort Press to take a peek at some work. It's a work in progress...plan on seeing more and more there soon! Our focus is poetry this week. We've gathered specific ways to make interpretation easier. We have dug deeper into figurative language as well. It's a stretch to go from literal to figurative meanings, but we are fabulously struggling through it!  In our writing, we've been analyzing sentences where two actions share a subject.  Our social studies work centered around an expository essay about Martin Luther King Jr. In math, we've considered the concepts of area and perimeter from many perspectives. We know that area is the space inside of a 2-dimensional shape and that it's typically measured in square units. Our perimeter investigations t...

Our classroom community came together this week and came up with a new way of taking care of our classroom and materials. They wanted everyone to be more involved, and the teachers wanted to make it an opportunity for students to take more ownership and leadership. They brainstormed, discussed, disagreed politely, ran through possible snags, and let the ideas flow. We now are piloting a new job routine -- ZONES! Each member applied for a zone, and they have a list of tasks to work together to complete. WOW...our classrooms are looking so much cleaner with their buy in!! On Thursday, Fourth Grade took in the exhibits and shows at the Bob Bullock Museum! Thank you to all the fabulous parents who offered to chaperone -- it made it so easy to spread out and see different things, and kept everyone safe! In ELA, we are refining and improving the complexity of our compound sentences -- using commas and conjunctions gives us a way to add variety to our writing...

We have jumped right in with both feet! As much fun as we had over break, it feels great to be back into our routine and catching up. This week we've been working on some renovations and problem solving as an SBLC family. The students are discussing issues with our current job market and the quality of work that's being done to take care of each other, our materials, and our space. They are brainstorming new ways (and jobs) to create better autonomy and accountability. We've also been revisiting the value that mistakes are absolutely necessary in our lives and show that we are growing. In addition, the piece of honesty and vulnerability when you've made mistakes has been addressed. Sometimes a belief that we are "getting out of trouble" or "brushing things under the rug" by not opening up about our mistakes makes a small problem a bigger issue...because it will come up later in one way or another. In ELA, we worked on compound sentence structure ...