If your child is in Knowledge Peak for math, last week you should have received an email from SignUp Genius to consider volunteering for our next Engineering Challenge days coming up in February. On Thursday, February 23, and Friday, February 24, during regular math classes, students will be doing their third STEM day in my class. Please consider coming and helping and joining in on the fun! If you did not get the email, here is the link for signing up: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0c4fa4ae2ea6fd0-stem This week I'll take a bit of your time to share the projects that my two current language arts groups are working on. For the month of January, I have 4th graders for language arts/creativity. We are focusing on reading nonfiction. We kicked off this topic by exploring the types of text structures (compare/contrast, cause/effect, sequential, etc.) of nonfiction books and the text features (pictures with captions, sidebars, index, graphs/maps/charts, etc.) that make nonfiction different than fiction books. Each student has a biography of a famous Colorado history figure. They will be reading their book and creating a list of facts about their person in the form of ABC's. They also have choice in one more project to share what they learned about their person either in writing journal entries as their figure, choosing objects to represent their person, or creating a cartoon of a major event from their life. The documents they are working on as they read are below if you are curious. All of their work for this biography project is due February 1 so please check in with your 4th grader and make sure they are on target to finish by that time. We'll be working all this week in class too. Fifth grade language arts/creativity students are also focusing their work with me on reading nonfiction. Their project is much larger and long-term though. Each student is choosing a topic of their choice to study as part of their Peak Project. They will be writing a five-paragraph essay on their topic and completing a project to share their learning with the class. The objectives with this project are many: learn to manage time for a project & meet deadlines, find resources (books and internet) and learn to take notes and cite sources appropriately, speak in front of the class, become an expert on a topic, and much more. Final essays are due before Spring Break and projects for sharing right after Spring Break. Our focus lately has been on how to choose a topic, narrow it down to the important subtopics and questions for researching. We'll officially start the research next week. Please periodically between now and March 8, check in with your child to see how their project is going. Below are some of the important documents that students will be using to help guide their work:
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As we start a new year, many people have getting organized as one of their goals for the year ahead. If you are trying to help make sure you start the year on the right foot with helping your student get organized for the new year, let me remind you what you should expect for homework if your child is in my math class. 3rd Grade Math Homework - Homework will come home nightly Monday through Thursday. It is due back the very next day. Third graders also get a "Pink Practice" on Mondays that is due on Fridays. This is always basic multiplciation/division fact practice. I require that third graders have a homework folder when they walk into class. They should be bringing that two-pocket folder back and forth to class and back and forth to home. Please take a moment to clean it out with them at least weekly since they bring home their corrected work in this too. 4th Grade Math Homework - Just like 3rd grade, these students will get homework Monday through Thursday nights and it is due the following morning. They also have "Pink Practice" that they will get on Monday and it is due on Friday which will help them review their basic facts. 5th Grade Math Homework - Fifth graders have nightly homework Monday through Thursday that is due the following day. For all of my classes, each night's homework is worth 5 points if they did it to the best of their ability with a pencil, put their name on it, and check it thoroughly with us in class the following day (see the document attached below for a breakdown of the points.) Each week's homework is worth a total of 20 points so if you look in the gradebook, you will note the week number and a score out of 20 points for your child each week. Missing points usually mean that they did not have it completed. When students do not have it done, they have to sit in the hall for the beginning of class and finish (then turn it into me for grading.) My biggest concern with late work is that they miss the valuable review that the other students get when we go over the answers before we begin a new topic for that day. How can you know what the homework is each night? If you have a 4th or 5th grader, they have a planner that should have their homework written down. I try to check with every student before they leave each day to make sure they have written in their planner. You can also access my online planbook which allows you to see the homework tab. Check out this link: https://planbook.com/planbook.html?t=974564&k=20162017 What topics should you expect for homework right now for math?
3rd grade Math - We have just finished a unit on determining area of rectangles. Our next unit covers data collection, specifically scaled bar graphs and picture graphs. 4th grade Math - These will be taking a test on Thursday on our unit covering factors/multiples and prime/composite numbers. We'll be heading into a few units on fractions very soon. 5th grade Math - We will complete our long-division review unit this week. Our next topic will be operations with decimals (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing,) as well as solving algebra equations dealing with decimals. |
Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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