Math & Socials

Hi All,

Some updates tonight:

Math test: haven't finished marking, but the results were not as great as I'd hoped. As such, I'm not sure it's worth sending home because the class obviously needs more instruction/practice on patterning. Since we are already starting on numeracy, I will be "injecting" some instruction on patterning once every few days so that we can also continue working on that strand of math. As such, another assessment on patterning will likely occur before report cards come out in early December.

Meeting with our math coordinator next week to start planning our parent night. Stay tuned for more information! In the meantime, be on the lookout for some Math games to come home. Especially with numeracy, games will help reinforce the concepts we are working on (and hopefully help some students focus on the fun in Math!). 

Last thing about Math: shared with the kids that Math is about laziness. We were working on representing numbers in a variety of ways today and got to talking about how identifying numbers by grouping them is much easier than counting one by one (example: 5 unit (or ones) cubes could be identified by seeing a group of 4 and 1 more rather than counting by 1's). The kids think it's absolutely hilarious! 

Socials: next Tuesday, the class will have a Map quiz. The focus for the grade 3's will be on the provinces and territories of Canada (won't be particularly picky about spelling, but later, there will be another quiz on capitals, and I will start to get a little more particular!). The grade 4's will be quizzed on all continents, oceans and hemispheres. We had a discussion about it today and have identified it through colour coding on the world map. The maps should come home tomorrow when they complete their work on them.

Remembrance Day - our class will be performing two poems. Hopefully they've been shared with you by now. I've told the children that we will be reciting them by memory. We worked quite a bit on reading chorally and observing punctuation as we read. We started to look at intonation and expression and have also talked about enunciation (particularly with the words humanity, vanity and embrace). We had a good discussion about the meaning of the two poems as well. 

HACE (Health and Career Education) - We've continued to work on 2nd Step. As you know from the homework from last week, we've been talking about being assertive (and also talked about passiveness and aggressiveness). We're currently working on developing empathy by trying to understand similarities and differences between people. 

Reading - finally started guided reading! I've met with our first four groups this week. The students are getting into the routines and expectations for guided reading and understanding that we meet as a group to discuss the book (predictions, connecting, prior knowledge, text features, vocabulary, etc.) and that is followed by individual "whisper reading" while each person meets (and reads) to me individually. Other than guided reading, we've also started to "check for understanding" by identifying main characters, setting and 3 key events (in sequence). As the students become more comfortable with this, we will start to add different components to our checks.

Writing - finished our Halloween writing!! The artwork they completed really complements the write ups about Haunted Houses or Potions for sale. Some fantastic ideas and words were used! Through this writing activity, I introduced the writing process (aka Writer's Workshop):

1. Brainstorming - ideas, words

2. Drafting

3. Editing - checking for spelling, conventions

4. Conference - they share their writing with me and we talk about what they did well and followed by 1-3 things they need to do to "revise" (improve) their writing

5. Revising 

6. Re-conference or Final copy.

Through the individual conferences, I can learn a lot about what students need to work on. Next week, we will be starting an activity on "hooks" (we talked a bit about introductions and conclusions in this past activity as well). The activities/assignments I give will be geared towards a certain write trait (see the class handbook for more info) or a writing feature. The conferences help me and the students narrow in on the individual skills that they need to work on as students are at a variety of comfort/skill levels in writing.

I put out a request for any clean and dry pumpkin seeds that may be left over from Halloween. We are planning a Christmas (yes! I am really not ready to think about it, but it's got to be done!!) craft and it's the perfect time of year to get pumpkin seeds!! If you've got any, we'd be ever so happy to have them sent our way.

Hope everyone had a great Halloween and that your coming weekend is a restful one!!

Math Test Tomorrow

Grade 4:
- addition table
- complete a given picture pattern, fill in the t-chart, describe the pattern.
- complete a partially filled out t-chart
- find the pattern using a calendar provided (word problem)
- Fact family (missing addend). Ex:  £+11= 20, 40 =  £-10
- describe pattern (decreasing pattern)
- 2 word problems (remember an equation is a math sentence (ex: 2+4=6))

Grade 3:
- given a pattern, continue it. Write the pattern rule (describe it)
- complete a given picture pattern, describe it
- number line pattern to complete and describe
- 100 chart pattern, observations of the given pattern
- word problem

Tonight's homework

Hi All,

Given the number of interruptions we've had this week, we're trying to play a little bit of catch-up through homework. Everything that's being sent home should be in the "finishing up" stage:

- Science (grade 4): I've given them class time to read pages 6-7 (page 5 is new today), highlight main ideas and to make notes on the 4 stages of the water cycle (condensation --> precipitation --> collection --> evaporation&transpiration). 

- Math: complete the sheet sent home - we've worked on it for two days. If they've forgotten: we are not doing question #4 and we are using question #3's number line to help us answer the last question. 

That's it for now!

Good news!

Hi All,

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I was pleased to be able to meet with all of you last week, thank-you for taking the time to come out. (Was so glad that I managed to stay mostly on schedule!)

The common theme around many of the conferences last week was Math and Homework. Let's talk about homework first. I am not a huge believer in homework because the children have been in school for so many hours of the day and need some "down" time, just like the rest of us. My other biggie is that homework needs to be meaningful for it to have any value, and at times, it's difficult to find work that can be sent home and reinforced in the way that I've introduced it in class. If you are interested in the topic, Alfie Kohn, a well known Education lecturer/author, has written a popular article called "Rethinking Homework" - read it here. (Just a read that gets you thinking!)

That being said, as you've discovered, I do send home some work that has usually been started in class and just needs to be completed. I will sometimes send work home that also helps families better understand what we are working on in class (for example, asking the children to fill in a graphic organizer that talks about connections - after we've done a few in class). 

Last thing about homework - anything related to word sorts - you can find the "how to" in that booklet that I sent home during the open house. If you need another copy, please let me know.

Onto Math! I attending a two day conference in Victoria last week.. all on teaching Math. I'll admit, Math is one of my favourite subjects to teach, so it was pretty exciting to be at an all-Math conference with teachers who were all of the same mindset. While I was there, I had the opportunity get our district Math Coordinator to agree to co-hosting a Math Parent night! (So exciting!). In the near future, Mrs. Bletcher and I will be announcing the date in which we will be running a variety of activities that will help you understand how Math is being taught in classes today. Once we hold the first evening, I will try to schedule a few smaller scaled sessions that focus on the strand we are working on. More details to follow!

Quick reminder that we have our field trip to Delta Museum tomorrow. Be on te look out for a Halloween letter this week!

Have a wonderful week!

Follow by Email

Hi all,

Just a short post on this rainy Monday night:
If you are interested, you can enter your email address in the "follow by email" box on the right hand tool bar. I've never tried this before, but I'm assuming that they email each time there is a new post. 

Stay dry!

Set and Self Evaluations

Hi all,

A busy week, but I feel like we got quite a bit accomplished in Math and Science. Hopefully we can start squeezing even more in as we get more and more familiar with routines and expectations.

First off - as requested, I've posted the link to the game SET on the side bar under Links. (HN - See! I remembered! Just for you! :))

Yesterday, we began our home reading logs. I asked the class to record what they read each night so that they may start to be a little more accountable with their nightly reading homework. I will be doing a "homework check" each Monday to see how much they've recorded on their logs.

Today, we added another component to their homework duotangs - A oral language/self awareness assessment. We will be completing this once a week, on the last instructional day of the week. Students are to reflect on their own participation and listening in class and from there, share this information with you and decide on one area that they are going to focus on in the coming week. We briefly talked about the importance of being honest with themselves on their evaluation because it really doesn't effect anyone except yourself - that this is meant for their own self-improvement! Since it's all about self improvement, we also discussed the meaning of reflection and also shared with them that it was meant to help each of them improve themselves and explained how I am continuously reflecting on how I am teaching them. For example, I will sometimes completely scratch an activity even though we first start it because I might notice that it's not working or I might go back and re-teach a concept in another manner because most of the class isn't understanding. Each Monday, I will also be checking these self-assessments to make sure that they've shared them with a parent and had their parent "autograph" (they were absolutely thrilled to get to autograph their own). 

We had a quick Math quiz today on patterning. Students were asked to build (with tiles), their own growing or shrinking pattern, transfer the pattern onto grid paper, create a t-chart and finally, describe the pattern using words. The quiz will hopefully be returned to them on Monday and will be sent home for a signature.

Grade 4's began a unit in Weather yesterday. Some of what I will expect them to do will be a little more independent - for example, read pages from the textbook and highlight key ideas. We will be focusing on identifying important facts and non-fiction text features this term as we work on Science. Next week, we will conduct a simple experiment that will demonstrate the water cycle and create a flap book that identifies the 4 phases on the water cycle and what each phase does. 

The Grade 3's continued to work on their unit on the Solar System. We have finished talking about the phases of the moon and have completed a book about the phases. This will get sent home next week for them to share. In the last two days, we've been learning about the sun and found 6 or more interesting facts about the sun from watching short clips from Bill Nye the Science Guy and reading about it from the Magic School Buses' tour of the Solar System. The children wrote down the facts they learned and then transferred them onto a "flower" foldable which will become part of their lap book on the Solar System (basically, as we learn different aspects of the solar system, they will add something they've learned to their book).

Hope that was not an overload of information on a rainy Friday night! Have a great weekend and see most of you next week at PT conferences!

IT

ps/ at the conference, to help me stay on time for appointments, I will be posting a notice asking you to knock when it's 1 minute to your appointment! I hope this helps eliminate too much wait time because 15 minutes just flies!

Grades and PT Conferences

Hi All,

Just a heads up - parent teacher conference schedules are going home tomorrow. If the time does not work for you, please give the office a call to re-schedule. To add more excitement to my day, next Thursday the 18th, I'm headed to Victoria for a 2 day Math conference on the 19-20th. This means that I need to catch the ferry early and will not be holding any interviews past 4pm. Since I'm not sure what time we'll be back from WE day, I am hoping to hold all conferences before the 18th. 

In other news, I've started to "grade" some of the entries in our Writer's notebooks. I spoke to the children last week about how they'll be graded and what the grades mean (more to come on this). I will be (or have) included a stapled in copy of the matrix of the Language Arts Writing outcomes in their book with a grade at the bottom. Since it's only first term, the grade 4's will be using a matrix that is based on the end of the grade 3 year and the Grade 3's will have the same but using the end of year grade 2 matrix. This will last until early 2013 when we will switch over to next matrix. Reason being - the tool was designed to evaluate students in the Spring and it would therefore be unfair to expect them to already meet expectations that may not yet be developmentally appropriate.

Just a quick reminder:
- Field trip next Tuesday - please send the form back if you have not already done so!
- Early dismissal next Thursday the 18th (As of now, Mr. D will be taking my class while I'm at WE day)
- Pro-D day on Friday, the 19th

Thanks!