For those wondering which days we'll be testing, see the schedule below. Times are not included, because it will vary depending on music and P.E. times.
Hi parents, Now that we're back from February break, we'll be beginning our second round of Genius Hour. This will be similar to our first round, with a few exceptions:
Hi parents,
We have concluded our unit on narrative writing and we're now working on informative (informational writing). Our sequence looks like this:
To keep you updated on your child's progress, I will be sending home the work from each practice round. I will include a rubric so you can see how your child would have scored if it had been the actual assessment. The first round is coming home today (Thursday, Dec. 8). One caution about the first round of scores: Nearly all students scored poorly, which is what we expected. We are talking about what is missing and how we can improve our writing. In addition, the fourth-grade team revised the rubric after I scored the first round, so students will need fewer total sentences to get the full score for that section of the rubric. (The sentences must still be on topic, however.) The practice scores will not go on their report card; they just to give all of us an idea about how much progress students are making -- where they're strong, and where they need to improve. Only the performance task scores will go on their report card. We are already working on Round 2, so look for that either next week or our first week back. Let me know if you have other questions. Hi parents, We will take our first field trip of the year on Tuesday, Nov. 8. I'm attaching a reminder sheet about the trip here. Your child will also bring a copy home on Monday. Please note that students should bring a bag lunch with them. Let me know if you have questions! Your child's mid-module assessment is in the Thursday envelope that's coming home today. This assessment covered place value, writing numbers in different forms (standard form, word form, and expanded form), and rounding. Next week we will take the end-of-module assessment. That will cover the same material plus addition and subtraction.
Since the beginning of the school year, I have been urging students to make sure they're answering what the question asks them to do. (For example, if the problem asks for ordering the numbers from greatest to least, don't put the numbers in order from least to greatest.) It's a gradual process, but students are already doing better with reading and following the instructions on their exit tickets and assessments. Our next module will cover metric units, so we'll still be using the "ten times as many" concept that we introduced in Module 1.
If you missed Back to School Night or wanted to take another look at the slides I used, they're below.
Hi parents,
By now you should have received our first math packet of classroom work; it was in last week's Thursday envelope. A word about pacing: For the first half of this module, we will be going more slowly. I will be doing a reteach after each lesson. We've found that giving students a good grounding in place value makes the rest of the year go more smoothly. If you'd like to see our class notes, including the problem sets that we've been doing in class, check out the math page in your child's Google Classroom account. (They should be able to show you how to log on, and we'll go over it as well on Back to School night. If you'd like your child's password in the meantime, feel free to send me a note or an email, and I'll make sure you can log on.) The math page has a PDF of each day's lesson, so you can see what we've been doing. In the math packet, you probably also saw a few exit tickets. Those are given at the end of each new lesson, to assess how well students understood the new material. As a general rule, the first few lessons are difficult for students, so don't worry too much if they struggled. As I said, we're doing reteach after every lesson. Each exit ticket has a colored dot at the top. Green means they completely understood the lesson; yellow means they partially understood it; and red means they need more work to understand it. These scores don't end up on their report card; they're just a snapshot of how well students understood the day's lesson. It helps me to decide on what, if anything, to reteach -- and to which students. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for reading! |
Mrs. Sweeney4th grade teacher Archives
February 2017
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