Posts By: Jon Moss
April 18, 2016
My SBAC Talking Points
Tomorrow is our first day of SBAC testing! Tomorrow morning, after specials, we will have our first ELA (English/Language Arts) test. After the practice we’ve done, I’m confident that the kids are ready for their second year of computer-based testing. Here are a few things that I’ve highlighted for kids (whether in whole-class discussions or private conversations), which you might also want to remind them:
- “The SBACs will ___ and will not ____.” You might be surprised what misconceptions kids have about the SBACs. Recently, I was asked if poor performance on these tests will prevent kids from going to fifth grade (no) or if it will keep kids from getting into college (double no). I try to be absolutely direct when telling what effect the SBACs will and will not have. (If you have a question about this, please ask me.)
- “It’s ok to be worried!” I think we have a tendency to try to remove kids fears by saying “Oh, don’t worry!” or “There’s no reason to be nervous!” The truth is, if a child is worried about the test, then clearly they feel that they have a reason to worry. I try to validate their feelings, and I instead focus on helping them to stop feeling worried, not on telling them to stop worrying. It’s absolutely normal for students to feel some anxiety about testing. As much as we try to reassure the kids, they understandably pick up on the importance of the tests, and they sometimes feel pressure, despite our best efforts to the contrary. I encourage you to remind your fourth grader that we ask only that they try their very best as they take the tests and that they think about and use all the strategies they’ve learned in school.
- “Just try your best.” I have been very direct with kids – I ask them just to try their very hardest. If they can honestly tell me that they did, then I’m proud of them. But part of trying your best means taking time to remember the things you have been taught and making yourself think carefully about your choices during an assessment, not just picking the first answer that looks decent so that you can move on to the next item. It also means CHECKING OVER your work. When you give encouragement for your kids, focus on effort (“Try your hardest!”) rather than on outcome (“Get a great score!”) in order to minimize pressure.
- “Sleep.” A sleepy student is predisposed to performing poorly on the SBACs. Please make sure that your child gets PLENTY of sleep the night before a test. (Consider enforcing earlier bedtimes, if you deem it appropriate.)
- “Have a calm morning.” By the same token, please try to minimize morning stress. Coming to school late and/or coming after a chaotic morning will put your child in a bad mind-set for testing.
- “Dress comfortably.” Nobody is worried about fashion during this week of testing. Kids should dress in a comfortable outfit that doesn’t distract them as they work. (Haven’t we all been bothered by an itchy label or a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit quite right?)
- “Eat breakfast.” A filling, nutritious breakfast is also essential to good test performance. (Growling stomachs will distract your child, and, frankly, other students too.) Please try to make sure your child has breakfast at home. Healthy snacks will be provided for students before testing, but there is no substitute for a good breakfast.
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
April 15, 2016
Cub Reporter: Week at a Glance
By Student #6
On Monday we got a new student.We also started a new math unit on geometry. On Tuesday in Spanish we got got down to only 1 letter left! (Moss’s Note: In Spanish class, good class cooperation earns letter, and disappointing choices results in the loss of letters. It’s been a tough few Spanish classes, I hear. Lots of side conversations.) We also got new math rotation groups. On Wednesday we got a little better on are hardest song in music: Dry your tears afrika. Also we did a lot of midwest group work and a classmate sang his favorite song A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down my pants! (Moss’s Note: Ok, this was FUNNY! I can’t do it justice here, so if you’re curious, ask your fourth grade how the game Alibi works and what was funny about the song!) On Thursday we had checkout day in library and we got through our last math rotation.
Final note from Mr. Moss: I apologize for the lack of updates in recent weeks! More information is coming soon!
Posted in Class Updates, Student News|By Jon Moss
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
February 29, 2016
Cub Reporter Message: Chinese New Year, Composing and Decomposing Fractions, More!
By Student #14
Last week in room 209, we did some very exiting things! Our classmate’s mom came in to teach us about the Chinese New Year, and then in math, we started learning about fractions; decomposing, adding, and subtracting them. (Really cool.) We have almost finished In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson which is a wonderful book about a girl who moved from China to America and I think September (one of the chapters ) is particularly funny . These are the exiting and wonderful things we’ve been doing in room 209!
Posted in Class Updates, Student News|By Jon Moss
February 28, 2016
Changing Math Lessons for Unit 6
As you may know, I am one of the two teachers from the PGS fourth grade team who are on the math curriculum committee for our grade. With three counterparts from RBS and our district K-6 math coach, we meet ever few months to continue the process of revising our math instruction. (I’ll be out next Monday morning to attend one of our curriculum work days.) When we transitioned to align with the Common Core two years ago, we found that our former series, Everyday Mathematics, was no longer appropriate in its entirety. As we rewrote our fourth grade math curriculum, we worked to pull materials and resources that were best suited for teaching a given concept or skill. Sometimes those resources came from individual Everyday Math lessons that we thought fit the objectives particularly well, sometimes they came from OnCore (which accounts for most of the worksheets you have seen come home), and occasionally we pulled in miscellaneous resources (including SMART Notebook lessons from SMART Exchange, homework or classwork worksheets from different sources, etc.)
Four our new math unit, which focuses on adding, subtracting, and multiplying fractions, we are using a new set of resources that we piloted last year. EngageNY is a resource made available by the New York State Department of Education. The state has developed Common Core-aligned lessons and resources for each grade, and we have found that the lessons are well-structured, include valuable resources, and integrate an appropriate amount of rigor (while not being unreasonably difficult). As a team, we have found that the program is particularly well-suited for teaching fractions (especially the concepts covered in the current unit). You and your fourth grader will see a few changes, and plenty of similarities too:
- Lessons are more structured. While worksheets are still included for practice at the end of lessons, they are less emphasized than other lessons we have considered. They will continue to be completed during math rotations.
- The word “tape diagram” is introduced. It means the same as “bar model” (which your kids should certainly be able to explain to you!) Both terms will be used interchangeably. I think it’s a different term because of copyright issues. That said, you may have heard your students discuss the differences between tape diagrams and area models late last week. These are very similar visual models, but they do have differences. Ask your fourth grader!
- Lessons continue to begin with a number talk, which allows students to practice mental computation skills and to discuss different methods in which they solved a given problem.
- Lessons may end with exit tickets. These are very short (one or two question) worksheets that let teachers get a quick overview of student proficiency. They can be used in different ways, including informal assessments, warm-ups for the next day, etc. I use them sporadically.
- Classwork and homework worksheets have the potential to be more lengthy. There are times when I may ask students to complete a whole assignment. Other times, I may ask kids to complete certain sections. Overall, however, the assignments will have more items than the five-item worksheets you remember from OnCore. Additionally, most items are open-ended, as compared to the OnCore multiple choice homework worksheets. This allows students to better apply their skills. Homework worksheets more closely resemble the classwork pages, so a correct sheet from classwork can help a student as he or she completes the homework page. You’ll notice that I (almost) always will have kids bring home their classwork worksheets. Even though they may not be entirely completed (for the reasons explained above), I think they can often be helpful guides as kids complete their homework. Students do NOT need to complete the unanswered classwork questions, unless that’s specifically written as part of the night’s homework assignment. This practice should be familiar, as I did the same thing in previous units when we used OnCore materials.
As with all changes to our instructional plan, we will continue to meet as a team to review our progress, discuss what we like and don’t like about the new lessons, and revise our plans based on our experiences from students.
Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
January 28, 2016
Recreating the Train: Number the Stars
Monday’s lesson focused primarily on dramatic terms and activities to help the kids to get prepared for the rest of the week. On Tuesday, the learned more about the character of Ellen Rosen, a young Jewish girl living in Copenhagen, whose life has changed because of the Nazi presence. The kids learned a bit about what was happening during the Holocaust, and particularly how it affected Ellen’s relationship with her non-Jewish friend, Annemarie. These programs tend to progress through key parts of the book, so Wednesday’s activity focused on a section that took place later on in the novel, where Ellen’s family learned that they must leave in order to avoid being captured by the Nazi soldiers. The kids learned that Annemarie’s family willingly accepted Ellen to stay with them, in hopes of protecting her, while Ellen’s parents sought protection in some other way (that we don’t yet know about). As they had in previous days, the kids participated in some dramatic activities to act out some of the conversations and situations that the young girls found themselves in.
Today’s activities were the most dramatic and revealing. This afternoon, the kids were invited to role-play what it would be like for them, playing the role of Ellen’s parents, to say goodbye to their daughter who was staying with another family for her own protection. This was a very dramatic activity for the kids, as they had to explain to Aurelia, who was playing the role of Ellen, their daughter, why they could not stay with her, and why it was not safe for her to come with them. They did a wonderful job thinking about what the parents would actually say to their daughter in that situation, and they showed their understanding of what they had been taught on previous days.
The final activity from today, however, was the most emotional, and, I think, eye-opening for the kids. By moving desks and chairs, our class was transformed into a train traveling out of Denmark. A Nazi soldier, again played by Aurelia (the theater educator), boarded the train and began to interview the passengers (the kids in our class). The kids were all assigned different roles, such as being a member of a Jewish family, being a member of a group of non-Jewish colleagues who were traveling for business, and other various roles. As they were questioned by the Nazi soldier, the kids did a very impressive job sticking to their characters as they tried to prove that they should not be targets of the soldier’s investigations. As really happened in history, the soldier identified many people, Jews and non-Jews, that she thought needed to be taken off the train. Passengers (the kids) were forced to quickly think on their feet and to come up with explanations to try and save themselves and their companions. This sparked a rich discussion later on as we discussed what the kids were thinking about during the activity.
There is no doubting that this is a very realistic activity. One of the challenges in teaching kids about the Holocaust is helping kids to develop a frame of reference. Here, fortunately, the kids in our class do not generally have any basis for understanding the concepts of genocide, hatred, and Anti-Semitism. We work very hard to give the kids an understanding of what happened, and an ability to relate to the experiences of people who lived during that time, while not putting the kids under undue stress.
Following these activities, the kids and I always have follow-up conversations, and I encourage kids to share their feelings and their concerns. I always reassure the students that these are events that happened long ago, and that they are safe here in their homes, in Connecticut. When the kids share how sad it is to learn about this, I remind them about the importance of learning about these historical events, among other reasons, so that we can make absolutely sure that nothing like this ever happens again. We had a wonderful conversation about the challenges that people in Europe (Jews and non-Jews) faced in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and I was really impressed by the kids’ mature contributions to the discussion.
Some of the kids may come home and start discussions about these activities. I encourage you to continue to have these discussions with your children, as I try to avoid going into some of the more graphic details with kids. Students are explicitly asked to avoid discussing these topics during lunch and recess so that they can benefit from having an adult to facilitate the conversations.
If your son and daughter seems concerned or stressed by what they’ve learned, I encourage you to remind them, first and foremost, that their feelings are understandable and valid! I never tell kids “not to be upset” because the material we are learning about is, in fact, upsetting. It’s understandable for kids to feel upset and saddened by the events, but if they are afraid, I remind them that these are events from long ago, and that they are safe in their own communities. I also remind them that the police in their community are very different from the Nazi soldiers who patrolled the streets in Copenhagen, and that the police officers in their town are trustworthy, safe people who really are there to help and protect them.
Tomorrow will be the last day of the role playing activities. They will learn about some of the later events in the text, and at the end, the students will receive copies of the novel, which we will read in school together. This week’s activities will serve as a framework for when we read the novel together. I ask that you continue to discourage your kids from reading or learning about the book until we read it in class together.
Please continue to be in touch with me if you have any questions as we continue this important unit.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
January 26, 2016
Update of Number the Stars (Day 2)
Today, Aurelia from The Hartford Stage came for our second day of learning about Number the Stars. The kids began by pantomiming several scenes, such as blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. The kids really enjoyed figuring out how to act out those scenes, especially since these moments were so familiar to them. Following these tableaux, Aurelia led the students in a safe discussion about what was happening in and around Copenhagen (the setting of the story) in the 1930s. She introduced the concept of the Holocaust, and I was surprised by how much many students already knew. She explained that Hilter looked for someone to blame for the problems happening in Germany and that the Jews were made into scapegoats. She shared that, eventually, many of the Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps where many worked and many perished. The kids took this topic seriously, and I admire their maturity during the discussion. I should say that there are times when students have additional prior knowledge and may start to share more sensitive information than what we’d normally choose to include. Aurelia and I both redirect the conversations when this happens, and we remind kids that some things are best discussed with families at home. There were a few instances of this today, and we were able to shift the focus back to what we were trying to address. In the event that something particularly sensitive is shared by a student in front of the whole class, I’ll, of course, give you a heads-up so you can be prepared for questions at home. I’ll communicate that through email, not through our class website.
Toward the end of the activity, students thought about what sounds they’d hear in a war zone. Ideas included explosions, gun shots, car engines roaring, people shouting, etc. Students made a “sound circle” where they created a cacophony of the sounds they’d expect to hear during a time of war. Finally, one group of four students recreated the previous tableaux of those familiar moments, but this time, with the “soundtrack” of the sound circle. This helped the kids to imagine how so many of these familiar moments would be different during wartime. Kids shared how they’d feel if they had to live during these situations, and their comments were deep. As I said in a previous message, these students don’t have much understanding of ideas like war, persecution, or hatred, and activities like these help them to understand these concepts a bit better.
Following these activities, I always remind students of a few things: (1) They are completely safe. We’re studying events from our world’s history, and by learning about them, we can work to ensure that they never happen again. But they are absolutely safe in their homes, school, and community. (2) These topics should be discussed when there’s an adult there to facilitate the conversation. So this isn’t appropriate conversation for the lunchroom, playground, bus, etc. (3) There are some things that might be upsetting or alarming. Kids can always come to me if they’re feeling worried or anxious, and they can talk to their grownups at home as well.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss