First of all, let me apologize for this long newsletter. My first one is aways VERY long because I think of what I left out at Parent Night!
The two other things I ran out of time to address regarding the survey, were homework and bullying. The majority were happy with homework last year. 2 were not big believers in the practice or at least, thought it should be relevant. My personal belief is that homework should be practicing what we are learning in class. It should not take more than 30-40 minutes for your child. (If it is taking "way" longer, please come talk to me.) I believe the reading is critical, there is a lot of research out there that confirms that the more children read, the more successful they are. Our math homework is always directly related to what we are doing in class. And spelling, lends itself to many other relevant skills that are on our course of study. I still have not found the perfect spelling recipe that is effective for all children all the time. I did forget to mention that the kids should only be doing 15 words for homework. If you want to see how we choose our words, you can go to our Parent Night handout on our home page and scroll to the chart.
Unfortunately consequences for bullying go above my head, and I will leave it at that. I will do whatever I have to do in my classroom to make sure none of our kids have to deal with that, but I really think we have a great class and our kids will be fine. :) I hope I restated adequately and addressed the concerns that were brought up in the survey, the site is down right now so I was unable to go back and re-read. My best piece of advice is that we are in this together and effective communication between us, the adults, is critical. Remember, 8-9 year olds, as wonderful as they are, are not always effective communicators, so, if you will believe only half of what your child says to you about me, I will do the same for you! :)
Here are just a few of the things that are already going on in our classroom:
Spelling: You will notice on some of the spelling tests there are two grades. Periodically I will give the kids a dictation sentence and grade them on conventions of writing, spelling, periods, etc. This also helps them to listen carefully and remember the sentence. I say the sentence twice so I tell them to remember as much as they can and wait for me to repeat it to get the rest.
Reading: In reading we have learned about where readers read, how to figure out words, strategies to understand, what we can do when we’re finished with a book, and how to log and respond in class. I’m asking the children to stick to a book so help me with this at home by making sure they are bringing the book they are reading in class home, or the book they are reading at home to school. I know I get confused when I have too many books going at once.
How would you like to know that your child understood a book without having to read it yourself? The kids have just learned how to use the Book Adventure website in class. This is a quick check that will help you see if your child understood the book he/she is reading. I’m asking those who are reading too quickly, or not “thinking” about their stories to re-read and make sure they know what is going on in the story. Here are the details about that program and how our class will benefit from it, and how you can use it to check your child’s comprehension:
Book Adventure
Book Adventure is a FREE reading motivation program for our class. Children take multiple choice quizzes on the books they've read offline, (in other words the books that they will use for this are the books they are reading in class and at home.) and earn points and prizes for their literary successes. This book can be their read and log book, book report book, or any other book they’re reading at home or at school. Just log on, after the book is read, type in the name of the book, and take the short quiz. It should be a just right book, not too hard or too easy.
Once your child has read a book he/she signs on to http://www.bookadventure.com/ and logs in, (their username is the same as their password and is written in their BEE books.) clicks on quiz finder, searches for the title he/she read, then takes the quiz. If your child scores low, you may want to have him/her re-read and try the quiz again. If you and your child need ideas for titles, you can search for thousands of titles by grade level and/or areas of interest on this site. We took our quizzes for the first month of school in our classroom.
Our goal is to take 2 Book Adventure quizzes a month at home. (They can take more if they want to) They can do this instead of reading twice a month, just let them log that they took a quiz on BA. I can check progress online as long as they sign in with their user code and password which can be found behind the “Important Tab” in their BEE book.
Math: We are almost finished with our beginning of the year math assessments and will soon begin our newly adopted TERC Investigations. We are reviewing addition and subtraction and it will continue to be practiced and assessed throughout the school year.
Math-Addition Strategies
Some things in school these days look a little different than they did when we were in school. Click here and scroll down to math to see the main ways that children come up with on their own to do addition problems. I ask that the children be able to use 2 strategies with ease (being able to use two is comparable to the old way of subtracting one of the addends from the sum to check your answer), and be familiar with the others for the sake of efficiency (You can always get the answer using any strategy, but many times, another strategy gets you there much faster. The best example of this is a subtraction problem, 10,000 -999, if we use the traditional borrowing and carrying it would take longer than adding 1 to 999 to get 1,000, then skip counting by 1,000’s to 10,000 which would make 9,001. You can also look at the links explaining strategies children use when subtracting and multiplying. The following are ways you can help your child when he/she is doing a math problem in any of the above areas:
1. Read over the addition strategies sheet. Come up with a different addition problem and practice solving it in each of the ways shown. Simply reading over the sheet once is usually not enough to understand these strategies if you are not familiar with them.
2. Watch your child solve an addition problem, ask your child to explain his/her thinking as the problem is being solved and determine which strategy is being used. Asking your child what he/she is thinking in any subject is so important in developing your child’s metacognitive thinking skills as well as his/her problem solving skills.
3. If a mistake has been made, ask your child to go over with you how the problem was solved, usually they can catch their own errors.
Help your child with organization: In the # 1 example, partial sums, there are two ways of showing this thinking. The first way connects the numbers with lines. This is fine for small numbers, however, as the numbers get bigger, the second illustration is a more organized way of showing the problem, children will start making mistakes when they try to draw lines or “string” larger numbers. Other forms of organization for math problems are numbering the problems, circling the answers, writing on the lines, skip lines between problems.
4. Ask your child to solve the problem in another way and go through the above steps. Stress that if a different answer is obtained, the child needs to go back and see where the mistake was made. Some children think that if they write a problem in 2 different ways, like example number 1 (attaching with strings and writing the problem in columns) then they are using 2 different strategies when in reality these two illustrations are using partial sums. It is important that your child be able to use 2 different strategies, if not then a mistake will usually not be “caught”.
I also believe that there is nothing wrong with the traditional algorithm UNLESS the child has no idea what the borrowing and carrying means and does not have a strong concept of number. If your child struggles with math, the traditional algorithm will not help your child’s understanding of what addition is. If your child seems to be confused, I suggest working with partial sums. It’s in columns, the only difference with the traditional is that sums of columns are written on different rows keeping place value in tact. And the columns are added from left to right which is what kids do and understand naturally. If you are new to our system, or just want to know more about how we teach math, please visit these links:
http://tconstantine.wiki.hoover.k12.al.us/Info+%26+Tips+for+Curriculum+areas
http://tconstantine.wiki.hoover.k12.al.us/Math+Casts
Science-Our Wisonsin Fast Plants are on their 7th day of growth. We are carefully observing each stage of our plant's life. We started with the parts of a seed and will follow our plant through pollination (real bees will pollinate our flowers!) and seed pods where the cycle starts over. The kids are already loving this unit!
Writing Next week we will begin setting up our writing binder, adding to our “ideas we can write about section”, and discussing what good writers do. Our first parent letter comes home today. We have discussed how to write a friendly letter and what we are shooting for (it may take a while for us to get there) is a 3 paragraph letter. The 1st paragraph will be a response to your letter, the second paragraph should be a “meaty” one with lots of details about ONE topic, and the last paragraph is a closing. Try to format yours in the same way, so that the children will have a good model to go by each week. When theirs comes home, have conversations with them about what you liked about their letter and things they can do to improve (indent, check for spelling and punctuation errors, write neater, write straight down the red line, etc.) We will be discussing all of these things in class, it will just help if they hear it coming from you too! Soon I will take a writing grade on their letter and you will get a scoring rubric with signed papers. We will be reading Dear Mr. Blueberry next week and discussing how the letters back and forth should flow like a good conversation and hopefully be a memorable keepsake.
Grades - All quizzes and tests are graded using a point scale. On many papers, you will see a point value or a raw score (ex.: 43/46) and then a grade (93/ A). The point value on tests is determined by the number of points given for each item on the test. For example the DOL sentence{she gave chris some candy} might be worth 6 (raw score) points, 3 points to put the 3 editing marks in the right place, and 3 points for writing the sentence with the corrections appropriately on the line below. So, if there were 6 sentences worth 6 points, the entire test would be worth 36 points. If your child missed 3 points, he/she would have a raw score of 33/36 and a grade of 92/A. Signed papers will begin coming home the 27th of August. I take some grades at school that I do not send home, but most of these grades are participation grades and I’ll let you know about them only if they are below good or excellent. So do not worry about an occasional low grade that comes home, remember I will have many grades in my grade book that will bring it up.
The kids are enjoying our website. Please make sure it’s saved to favorites at home for easy access. They will have the opportunity to use it a lot this year!
It was great to see everyone at Parent Night, I'm looking forward to an awesome year working together with you and your children!
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