Friday, October 16

Howdy!

• The students had Science first period with Ms. Galan and Mr. Hoffman.
• Second period was about assessment.  Several students needed to finish their Chapter 1 Math test.  The other students used the ipads to take Accelerated Reading Book Quizzes on the books they have checked out for independent reading.   This was my noticing....

• Many students are not reading at home like they are supposed to.  Parents, if you want your students to improve in reading, they must read.  Please make it a priority to have your child read for 30-45 minutes.  I know life is busy, but please find the time to sit with them.  Listen to them read.  Ask questions about the book they are reading.   If it is important to you, it will be important to them!
• The students who are reading and taking tests on books that ARE in their reading level are still missing too many questions on the book quizzes.  That means they are not reading closely or being as diligent in their reading as they should.  Quiet areas with little distractions is a great place to crawl up with a good book and read.
• As with anything, if you want to get better, you have to practice.  That is why homework is assigned - FOR PRACTICE.  I would encourage you to check homework nightly because many of your children are not completing homework.  This effects their grades in multiple ways.  One, they have missing assignments so that lowers their grade.  Second, they are not getting the practice in the areas we are working with so they are not prepared for assessment.  And lastly, if we don't have work to assess, we can't tell if they need additional reteaching or help in an area.  We can't assess what we don't see.
• Finally - If you are absent, you are still responsible for the work you missed.  If you are absent one day, you 2 days to turn in mixed.  We don't expect it the next day, but two days is the max.  If you are absent two days, we expect it three days later.  We have to know where your child is.  That is the only way we can help them progress and move as learners.
• Third period was another assessment period.  This time we looked at Chapter 1's Performance Task.  We went question by question, step by step.  We discussed what parts of each questions were important.  We marked up our paper, underlining important numbers and phrases that allowed us to make a checklist of the steps we had to take to solve each problem.  We did all the "thinking" work and then allowed the students to do the computation and problems solving.  We want them to see that word problems are not difficult.   It means slowing down, reading the problem CLOSELY, and then making a mental list of steps to solve it.
• The performance task went into fourth period.  When it was done, we switched gears back to literacy.  We finished Unit 1A, so now it is time to see if they learned everything we covered over the last 18 lessons of reading and writing.  We went over the task.  Again, we went over it line by line and highlighted exactly what they were responsible for writing.  We talked about how it matched up to the different lessons we had learned.  We then went over the rubric that was going to be used to score their writing task.  We went over each section and showed them how easy it was to get a 4 if they just use all the aspects we had practiced over the last 18 lessons.  Finally we went over the two different graphic organizers they should use to plan their narrative. 
• Fifth period is LUNCH!
• Sixth period we returned to the class and got back in literacy mode.  We reviewed the task once more and then went over all the steps they would need to complete their task.  After a quick review of the steps to writing an amazing PBA - we passed out all the materials and turned on the nice soft classical music so students could start to work through the writing process.....
• Read and Understand Your task!
• Plan your writing using graphic organizers
• Draft your narrative
• Revise your writing to make it better
• Edit your writing for grammar, spelling, and capitalization
• Publish your final draft
• They had 40 minutes in class to plan and draft their work.  For homework they were told to read their narrative to an older sibling or parent and ask for feedback  and then revise, edit, and write their final narrative.
• Seventh Period we worked on Changing Communities.  The students have been reading about what makes a community, how they are different, and now how they change.  We will be having a Chapter 1 Social Studies test toward the beginning of next week!

Homework:

1. Writing PBA - work with an older sibling or adult to revise your draft, edit your draft, and write your final copy to be turned in on Monday.
2. Return permission to videotape and take pictures of your child.  We like to take lots of pictures of your children working hard in class, having fun at recess, or learning on field trips.  If we don't have permission, we can't take their picture and it gets hard to class class pics, etc...
3. Some of your children got letters from the ELL department that need to be signed and returned as well. 
4. Scholastic book orders were sent out last week.  We would like to place the order so students can have more books to read.