Viewing: March, 2016
March 24, 2016
Cub Reporter: Acting Out Fractions
By Student #18
In school we are doing lots of things. Here is what they are. We are continuing to do fractions in math. We have a new strategy in which people are acting a problem out. It helps us understand the problems better. Students in our class are also learning about the southeast and are making presentations about them. Also Mr. Moss is teaching us beginning and endings for our Sarah’s House Disaster stories.
Luckily we have a short week this week due to holidays and conferences, so enjoy the warm weather and the long weekend.
Posted in Class Updates, Student News|By Jon Moss
March 2, 2016
Where is your child’s work and grades?
It wasn’t so long ago that parents could open their child’s homework folder and find corrected language arts work coming home on a regular basis. These reading and writing exercises had teacher comments and a grade, and parents could see what their child was working on in school. This year, those same opportunities exist, but it’s all online now. When we met for December parent-teacher conferences, I discussed Google Classroom with many families. With our next round of conferences coming later this month, I thought this would be a good time to remind you of this wonderful resource.
Google Classroom is a core part of Google Apps for Education. Think of it as a learning management system that allows me to share resources, distribute files, assign tasks, and allows students students to complete and submit tasks, receive feedback, discuss ideas with peers, and more. (The short video above, while slightly out of date, does a great job of showing what Google Classroom can do.)
Nearly ALL of your child’s written work is completed on a Chromebook, within Google Classroom. Parents of PGS fourth graders should ALWAYS be able to access their child’s Google Classroom account (using their child’s username and password, which should always be shared with parents). To login, visit classroom.google.com and log in with your child’s username and password. There, you’ll find a lot of your forth grader’s work, along with my feedback and grades. Sometimes grades may be posted in the Google Classroom assignment section, but I often put grades within the student’s document itself. I encourage you to check Google Classroom on a periodic basis, although the one thing I ask is that you NOT make revisions to your child’s work without checking with me. A lot of what you’ll find is a work-in-progress, and it’s important that students have the opportunity to learn by working through a process, rather than having corrections made by an adult at home. (Remember, you’re logging in as your fourth grader, not under some separate parent account. So there’s no way for me to distinguish work your child does from revisions you may make.)
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
March 1, 2016
Looking at the Unit 5 Math Assessment
Math tests are no fun, and reviewing work may be dull, but it’s so important that students work carefully in order to be successful.
Hopefully, you’ve had an opportunity to review the unit 5 math assessment that your son or daughter has brought home to correct, have signed by an adult, and return to school. We took our time to review the assessment over several days because, in all candor, I was disappointed by the students’ performance. As I explained to the students, I would never share my disappointment with them if I found that they (as a class) tended to struggle with the content on the assessment. (In cases like that, teachers should recognize that they need to go back and reteach the concepts that were challenging. But no teacher should ever make a student feel bad for having trouble with a skill.) In this case, I did share my disappointment, because I saw something else happening. On this assessment, I found that many of the students lost points because they did not read and follow the directions with care. In several instances, students answered only one part of a question while ignoring others. There were many times in which students ignored the directions to “Show your work” or to express an answer in multiple forms. On one question, students were asked to write a fraction to show how many items of the total are being counted, but many students just listed a number. These mistakes tend to happen when students hurry through an assessment, fail to read whole questions, etc. I also found that assessments were handed in with pages inadvertently left blank, and while I understand that mistakes happen, this shows how quickly and (not) deeply some students reviewed their work before handing it in.
I’m sharing this with you in hopes that together, we can help the students to build more successful work habits. Attention to detail is a careful thing to instill in a fourth grader because, frankly, it’s often not fun to do! Who wants to reread a question if they think they got it right the first time? Who wants to work more slowly if they think they can do a perfectly good job moving through the task quickly. The mistakes I’ve described here were common throughout the class, which is why I’m sharing my concerns in this forum. In some instances, they resulted in the student’s grade being as much as 10% lower (or even lower) than what it should have been based on the student’s apparent mastery of the concepts. Attention to detail becomes only more important in fifth grade and beyond, so this is an excellent time to help the students to become more careful, more diligent workers. Thank you for your help, and please feel free to reach out if you have any thoughts!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss