Coming home this week are the mid-year ALP progress reports. You will find rubrics for math, language arts, and creativity depending on the area of identification for your child. With the rare exception, you should find your child's self-reflection on their work this year, as well as a rubric filled in by the teacher who instructs your student in that academic area. There are also assessment and goal setting checklists for the affective (social/emotional goal) that each child has. Please look them over and let me know if you have questions. Please remember that is just a chance to check in on growth so far. Meeting or not meeting the intended score on the rubric at this point in the year simply shows where your child has made growth already and where more growth is needed by the end of the year. I am usually very pleased to see that student self-reflections are very honest and generally reflect what the teacher is seeing in class. My hope with this process is that it generates a conversation at home about what is going well and what might need a little work. You received an email in October that contained your child's original ALP with goals and services. If you cannot find your copy, please let me know, and I will be glad to send your child's ALP again. Fourth grade is a year for learning foundational algorithms that will be used from now on in math. One example of that is learning to complete long division problems. I sent an email to 4th grade families this week sharing the strategies that we cover in class. In case some of the rest of you are interested in the "crazy" algorithms that we teach in school now, I have attached links to a quick demonstration video from our textbook publisher. To reiterate, my goal in teaching math is always to help students understand both the why and the how of math and learning multiple methods works to that end and also helps them see that math can be creative in that there is almost never one way to complete a problem. In education today we call this the conceptual understanding (why the math works) and procedural understanding (learning the algorithms and shortcuts.) Both carry equal weight in real-world jobs so I try to make sure there is quality time spent in class on both. Alternatives to Traditional - Long Division: Partial Quotients - Long Division http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/teaching-topics/computation/div-part-quot.html Column - Long Division http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/teaching-topics/computation/div-column.html Finally, Colorado teachers this year are preparing to switch from giving the TCAP, paper-and-pencil state tests to the new PARCC testing online (based on Common Core and our new standards.) PARCC testing (much like I mentioned above) tries to test both conceptual knowledge (math understanding and application) and procedural knowledge (solving equations and using algorithms.) At this time, our plan at Werner is to complete 2 days of math testing in March on PARCC's performance-based testing (PBA.) Then there will be additional days in May that will be a summative assessment called EOY (End of Year.) This testing will still begin in 3rd grade and continue into high school. I thought some of you might be interested to take a practice test to see what PARCC testing looks like. It is all online now so students will be taking both language arts and math testing on their computers. Follow the link below and then click on the grade level you want to explore. It will open a testing environment that will look exactly like what your child will be seeing in a few months during the EOY testing. http://parcc.pearson.com/practice-tests/math/
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Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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