Parent-teacher conferences are coming up during the month of October. If you are interested in having a conference with me about your child's progress, please send me a quick email at [email protected]. I prefer to meet with you and the homeroom teacher to keep communication lines open between all the areas of your child's education so please let me know when your conference is scheduled, and I will try to attend. If that is not possible, I will make other arrangements to meet with you at a more convenient time. This year to reward classes with excellent ROAR behavior in my class, every day classes each start the day with 5 stars on the board. They can lose and gain back stars based on good choices, hard work, and self-control during class. Every time a class earns a 100 stars, they earn a 1/2 hour of game time the next day. As added incentive, 4th and 5th grade math students have recently been competing to see who could reach 100 stars first. Both classes earned 100 for the first time on Monday so their extra prize was a homework pass to be used at any point during the school year. In addition to our group goal of 100 stars, I also use the Werner individual rewards of paw stickers and paw tickets for those that go over and above expectations related to respect, own your own behavior, attitude, and responsibility. And now for a little fun video break... both 4th and 5th grade are working on units related to graphing and determining important landmarks and measures of central tendency (mean, median.) I am a music lover and who doesn't like a catchy tune that teaches too. (Mr. C has a couple of other videos that kids love too on other math concepts.) Enjoy a taste of a silly video that the kids love!
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Wednesday night I had the privilege of presenting with my daughter at Werner Literacy Night about our experiences starting a family book club. If you weren't able to make it and that is a topic that interests you, I loaded the PowerPoint that we presented on the language arts page of the website (scroll to the bottom.) Not everyone has time for that but we do all want to make sure our kids are reading good books so I am attaching a book list that my son's third grade teacher and I compiled. The list shares book series that are at a higher reading level for upper elementary. Another resource I shared was a website where you can put in the title of a book and see if it is appropriate for your child (it will give you a quick rating and if the book is marked mature, tell you why.) I know, being the mother of a 13 year old, that it is impossible to read everything before they do so use this website to help: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ Third grade math is underway. I always like to kick off my groups with a cooperative activity to help them realize the value of working with others to problem solve. Although not directly tied to a math concept, the kids had fun "Saving Fred" this week with their partner. Fred is our friendly gummy worm whose boat capsized and he has to get his life preserver on (otherwise known as a gummy life saver!) The trick is you can't use your fingers directly but must instead use paperclips and ingenuity. This has become an annual event for 3rd grade so if any of your kids refer to gummy worms now as Fred - you know why! Check out more photos on the photo page. Fourth and fifth grade math students took their first unit tests this week in our class. You should see your child's test coming home in Friday Folders this week (if you do not ask your child where it is.) There are also progress reports for these two grade levels that show their current grade including this test. Tests count for 40% of their grade. Because they are such a big piece and because I think the focus should be on learning, mistake making, and fixing mistakes, I offer students the opportunity to fix their test for a higher grade. They can earn back 1/2 of the percentage points they missed if they use a test reflection sheet to re-solve their problems and reflect on why they think they missed it. Sometimes they have time in class and sometimes they need more time outside of class. A big part of learning is taking ownership of their learning and their grades as part of that. As long as a student does not get a D or F, they have the choice of fixing their grade. I always encourage them to think about if they are happy with the grade and feel it is their best effort. If they got an A and they still want to fix it, great! If they got a C and choose not to fix it, that is part of owning their learning. Please take time this year to chat with your child about what your expectations are for their grades and what your family values related to grades are. It is much easier to set expectations now than in middle school and high school. So that you know what the reflection sheet looks like I have attached it below. And as always, if you have questions about this, please let me know. Maybe you are coming to terms with this being your child's last year at Werner if they are a 5th grader or maybe you are just interested in what math education looks like in Poudre beyond elementary school. Either way take a peak at the following document provided by PSD's math facilitator Kelly Shank. Although some middle and high schools are still evolving their math options, this is a general overview of what math classes could look like depending on the path your child chooses and where their test scores place them. (Click on the document open the PDF.)
At Back-to-School night, I mentioned a few resources for both adults and kids to help understand some of the unique needs of gifted learners that relate to their affective needs (their social/emotional growth.) If you are interested, here are some of the resources I have found most useful: For parents - This book is a hot topic in education right now especially with the focus on 21st Century thinking skills. Carol Dweck lays out the two types of mindsets - growth (believing that it is possible to learn anything with work) and fixed (believing talents are inherent within us and cannot be changed.) This book applies to more than just teaching and parenting but also to the work, business, and sporting worlds For parents - Paul Tough looks at schools where students are low-income and high performing and also high-income and high performing to see what helps students succeed. The big focus in this book is on character traits and how students learn skills like perseverance and resiliency. The author also shares about the importance for having opportunities to make mistakes in order to be ready for the real world after school. For parents (especially educators) - This book was part of a class that I took last school year. It is full of useful activities and discussion topics to work with kids on understanding themselves better. There is information on helping perfectionists, pessimists, relationships, and other timely issues that gifted students face K-12. For kids - Written to "you" and referring directly to the elementary-age kids, this book has a lot of great "think abouts" for GT students. It covers a lot of the same topics from the above book but does it in kid-friendly language and has quotes from kids that your student will relate to. It is a great resource to have at home for your child. My favorite part of this book is how it encourages kids to self-advocate with their parents and teachers. For kids - Again this book is written to "you" and geared directly at GT learners. This book is appropriate for upper elementary and middle school. It is literally 101 one-page articles on topics kids are facing - dealing with homework, how to get organized, how to make friends, how to relax, and plenty of other topics to spur conversation at your house about school and life success. You wouldn't know it to look outside today, but the weather has been gorgeous lately for being outside - not too hot, not too cold. Sidewalk chalk is so much more fun than a pencil and paper so 4th grade math took the time to go outside to work on our geometry unit by drawing lines, segments, rays, and types of angles. We worked on parallel and perpendicular too. Check out more pictures on the photo page of the website. 4th and 5th grade language arts enrichment is in full swing this week. I mentioned last week about how we spend time each week working on Greek/Latin root words. Another element of our weekly meetings are book discussions in the form of literature circles. 4th graders are all reading "school" books all by Andrew Clements. Both of the Clements books that the kids have picked have a strong character who is trying to solve a problem in a creative way (and is maybe a little stubborn too!) 5th graders are reading realistic fiction also. Their books are all by the author Carl Hiassen. His books have an ecology focus where a group of kids is working together to solve an environmental issue. This ties nicely with one of 5th grade's science units they will complete in their homerooms. These books all relate back to the theme of being courageous to stand up for what you believe. Tonight was our annual GT Back-to-School information night. As a mom and a teacher, I know life is busy so in case you weren't able to make it take a moment to look through my PowerPoint presentation from the evening and email me with any questions you might have. I have attached the file below but it is always on the "Werner GT Information" portion of the website too. Language arts enrichment began this week for 4th and 5th graders. I am looking forward to working with 4th grade every day during the first and third semester and 5th grade Monday through Friday all year. We will be reading and writing, as well as doing projects and literature circles. One of the things I try to do each week is work with the kids to learn the origins of English by studying Greek and Latin root words. This is a great way for the kids to increase their vocabulary and work on seeing patterns in spelling in our language. You might think we are all a little strange when I share with you how much the kids LOVE this part of the week! We brainstorm words with the root of the week, play a game, and do a little reinforcing work. For example, 4th grade's first word this week was ped (meaning foot) so we found words like pedicure, pedestrian, quadruped, and more. 5th graders math students are hard at work continuing their work on advanced number sense in math. We have been working on vocabulary related to factors/multiples and prime/composite. We tackled determining greatest common factors. As an extension this week, we learned about Goldbach's conjecture (see if they remember what he is famous for!) Today we learned how to find the prime factors using factor trees and had fun with creating factor trees in our math notebooks (see picture examples below.) We will continue work on this for one more week learning divisibility rules, reviewing order of operations, exponents, and scientific notation with our test on or about 9/15. While 5th grade works with numbers, 4th grade math students have been dealing with shapes. We are continuing our work with geometry including our understanding of lines/line segments/rays, angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and polygons. While the shapes themselves are not hard to learn, knowing how to name and label these always proves a bit tricky. We took our first quiz of the year today - look in Friday Folders for how your child did or ask them for their copy. Some students brought their quiz home today in order to fix/finish for improved thinking (and an improved grade.) This quick geometry unit will be completed with our unit test on Thursday, 9/11. |
Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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