Viewing: Class Updates
September 20, 2010
Math Family Letters
Missing one of the family letters that go with the Everyday Mathematics units? You can download them directly from the publisher’s website. They give you great information about what skills we are covering in math. Plus, they come with the answer keys to all the Study Links. (I know you all know your math, but I have a feeling that you might want a guide for some of the “funky” math strategies that WE never learned in school, like the good ol’ Lattice Method of Multiplication.
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Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
September 19, 2010
Meet Mr. Martucci
A letter of introduction from Mr. Martucci, a student teacher working with Mr. Feschler in PE:
September 8, 2010
Dear Parents/Guardians:
Hello! My name is Matt Martucci and I am currently a Student Teacher for your child’s Physical Education class at Pine Grove Elementary School. I am completing my undergraduate coursework at Central Connecticut State University this fall, and will be earning my K-12 teaching certification. I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to be learning from and working with Mr. Feshler over the first eight weeks of the school year. He is an excellent role model and cooperating teacher. The Pine Grove faculty and staff have kindly welcomed me as a new member of the school community, and I certainly appreciate their support.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or concerns that you may have at the email address provided at the bottom of this letter. I look forward to having the pleasure of teaching your child, and hope to meet many of you at Open House Night next week. Thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely,
Matt Martucci
Tooch022@sbcglobal.net
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
September 16, 2010
Reminder: Open House TONIGHT
Open House will be held tonight promptly at 7:40, ending at 8:10 pm. I hope to see you this evening! For directions to our classroom, click the “Read the rest of this story” link, below.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
September 15, 2010
Off to a great start!
We’re now in the third week of school, and I’m so proud of the great work the kids’ have done since the first day of school!
Our year began with several getting to know you activities including Two Lies and a Truth (on display on the kids’ lockers for open house), a Q&A time, and more. I focus a lot on building a positive classroom community, and I think we’re off to a good start.
One of the most time-consuming parts of the start of a new school year is going over classroom routines. By now, kids are familiar with the arrival and dismissal process, our homework policies, classroom management routines, etc.
Our first truly academic activity of the new school year was the start of our “Summer Item” writing activity. Each student brought in an item that represented a memory from the summer. This gave us the opportunity to discuss the difference between narrative (story) writing and expository (article) writing – the kids were given the choice of styles for their writing. We started by planning out the who, what, when, where, why, and how of each student’s summer experience, and now the students are writing rough drafts of their summer item stories. I’ve conferenced with a little over half the class so far, and I’m hoping to start final drafts within the next week. My one-on-one conferencing with kids has given us a chance to practice independent work habits – something that sounds simple but is often challenging for students.
We started our reading series in the second “week” (all two days of it) and are now finishing our second story. We are working on narrative elements (setting, characters, problem, solution, main events), prefixes and suffixes, and (tomorrow) types of sentences. These are all skills you can review with your child at home during shared reading time, while watching TV, or when at the supermarket. If you need ideas, I’m happy to help!
In math, we are in the middle of our first geometry unit. Kids have learned about lines, line segments, rays, polygons, parallel and perpendicular figures, and more. The kids have worked together for a variety of activities.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s open house, and to a successful school year in general!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
September 15, 2010
Headlines for Mid-September
Here are some key pieces of information you should know:
- Book orders are due this coming Monday. You can order online, or by sending in a check. To order online, go to the special Scholastic website and enter our class code: GZD87
- Our classroom’s temperature has a tendency to shift to extremes. In the afternoon, it can get a bit chilly, and during the winter, the heat can make the room quite warm. Please plan accordingly and consider sending your child into school with a sweater or indoor jacket that he or she can keep in his or her locker.
- We have our first Spirit day this Friday! Kids are encouraged to wear silly footwear for our Town Meeting at 2:30! Remember, we will have an outdoor recess, so if your son or daughter needs to bring a spare pair of shoes for outside, he or she will have a chance to change.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
August 18, 2010
Welcome to Fourth Grade
Mr. Moss with Suzy Kline, author of the Horrible Harry book series and the Herbie Jones series.
Hello! Welcome to the online home of PGS Room 209. During the school year, I will update this web site regularly with information about activities happening in Room 209, bulletins and news items, current events related to what we’re studying in social studies, online assignments, and much more.
About Me
I graduated from the University of Rhode Island summa cum laude in 2004 and have a degree in Elementary Education and Psychology. I also have a Masters Degree in Educational Technology at Central Connecticut State University‘s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Technology.
This will be my seventh year teaching at Pine Grove School. I taught third grade at PGS for five years before moving to fourth grade last year. While at URI, I taught grades 3, 4, and 5. I have also taught kindergarten, first, and second grade summer school, and I have interned with an elementary school principal in East Hartford. I have a background in experimental research in the field of social psychology, so you’ll probably see my interest in research and statistics come through this year during math lessons!
Charlie and me at Rocky Neck Beach over the summer.
I live locally with my wife, my son (Charlie), and our dog (Rimley). I have been fortunate to be able to stay home with Charlie since March, but I’m eager to return to work. In my spare time, I like to travel to Rhode Island, Boston, or New York City. I also enjoy making movies on my Mac, working on home improvement projects, or just relaxing by cooking, listening to old time radio shows from the 1940s and 50s, reading comic books, or watching the news. I collect old reel to-reel tapes of music, antique or unusual telephones, and all things related to Star Trek. This summer, I started learning to play the harmonica. I’m not very good yet, but I’m having fun practicing.
I enjoy tinkering with my computer and coming up with interesting ways in which I can use technology in the classroom. (You can definitely expect to use computers a lot in Room 209! I am the school’s lead technology teacher, and I enjoy using computers, our class’ SMART Board, and other technologies while teaching.) Of course, I also love watching my favorite sports team, the Boston Red Sox! (Don’t worry Yankees fans, I promise not to be mean!)
It’s going to be a great year in fourth grade. There are so many new things to learn, and there are some really interesting activities coming up! I can’t wait for the new year to begin!
For more information about our class, click “Read the rest of the entry”.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
March 19, 2010
Great Writing Resource
If you’re looking for ways to help your child improve his or her writing skills, I highly recommend a book called 350 Fabulous Writing Prompts, which you can purchase though Amazon.com. Also, you can find wonderful resources at a local teacher store called The Chalkboard. Located in West Hartford, this store has books, flash cards, learning games, manipulatives, and more. The staff at The Chalkboard is very knowledgeable and can push you in the right direction!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
March 16, 2010
Countdown to Report Cards
Report cards will go home tomorrow (Wednesday)! Everyone excited? With the report cards, I will enclose my usual letter about how to interpret march report cards. I’d like to take a moment to expand on two of the bulletpoints in the letter:
- The Developing grade represents a broad range of skills, ranging from early understanding to near mastery. For this reason, it is important to realize that if your child remains at a “D” across multiple marking periods, they are maintaining consistent growth and are continuing to improve in their skills. A Developing grade shows that your child is performing on grade level.
- In some skill areas, it is common for students to perform at a certain level during the first marking period, and for their grade to drop in the second. That’s due to content becoming more challenging, particularly in the second marking period. This is not out of the ordinary and, in many cases, shows that your child is being appropriately challenged in school.
I’ll be candid: I dropped a lot of grades this marking period. Most instances were when an S (Secure) changed to a D (Developing), but there were also instances when a D dropped to a B (Beginning). I absolutely realize that this will be a distressing thing to see on a report card, so I want to explain why this generally happened. Those of you who were with me last year may remember my comments that “Third grade is a big transitional year” and “Your child is now learning advanced skills that build upon older concepts.” In fourth grade, this is even more true. Third grade math took a lot of old concepts and added new layers to them. While this is still the case in fourth grade, there are also brand new skills being introduced – particularly in the second marking period. It is not uncommon for students to experience a challenge with the new material. Remember, a challenge isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The same is the case with writing skills – my expectations have increased as we’ve learned new skills and practiced new applications of writing, so I am grading with a higher standard in mind. A drop in grade does not mean that your child’s skills have worsened – just that he or she may not be excelling to the same extent that he or she had in the past.
Of course, each report card situation is unique, and students’ individual grades are based on his or her own performance, so my explanations here will not apply to each and every situation. If you have questions or concerns, be sure to bring them up when we meet for our conference!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
March 10, 2010
CMTs, Class Book, and More!
It’s been some time since I’ve had an opportunity to post an update on our site with news about some of the happenings in class, and I apologize for the delay. What a busy few weeks! CMTs will be completed in just about 12.5 hours from now, and the kids can all breathe a “sigh” of relief! I commented to one parent that I’ve never seen a group of kids handle the unavoidable pressure so well. The kids have approached the mastery tests with grace, composure, and (from what I can tell as an unobtrusive observer) with lots of effort. I’ve come to expect no less from this group of kids, of course!
But then again, you probably want to hear about more exciting news – like the answer to the ubiquitous question: “Jon, who on earth is taking over for you when you leave in two-and-a-half weeks?!” I can tell you that thanks are moving forward and that I hope to be able to share news with you in the coming week. One of my priorities is that I want to meet with my long-term substitute BEFORE sharing the news with you. This isn’t with the intention of delaying you from getting information. But, candidly, I know that many of you will have questions about my successor, and I want to do my best to have answers ready for you, rather than giving you a canned response – something which couldn’t do anything but lower your confidence in the transition process! But please know that things are going well and that I am VERY confident that you have nothing to worry about!
Back to class news… It’s interesting to see how the fourth grade team handles CMT preparation differently from what we did last year in third grade. Not better, not worse – just a different approach. This year, before each of the major CMT tests (…all of them!) the teachers reviewed general skills with the kids that they would be asked to apply the following day. While the extra practice may have helped the kids scholastically (and I certainly hope it did), I think the extra review helped them to feel more confident in their own readiness to “attack” the CMTs. I’m a firm believer in self-fulfilling prophecies, and I think that a student who BELIEVES that he or she will do well is more likely to achieve that goal. These extra review sessions have pushed our usual curricular lessons to the side, in some instances, so we’ve moved a bit more slowly than we normally do.
Reading is one area where we’ve REALLY taken a break lately. (I’m referring to specific reading lessons from our anthology program. Reading SKILLS are, of course, taught throughout the school day.) That’s why we haven’t had spelling words in two weeks. We’re starting to return to the anthology and the kids learned some new vocabulary words this morning.
Writing has, in turn, come to the forefront in recent weeks. It’s a skill the kids need to be able to apply with confidence and ability, and – let’s face it – it’s a skill kids need to apply in the overwhelming majority of the CMT tests (except, perhaps, the cloze-style DRP test, which the kids completed yesterday.) Last week, we practiced a few writing scenarios based on the made up topic of “Imagine you found a wallet with $1,000,000 in it. What would you do?” This let us explore several writing scenarios and what an effective approach would look like. We brainstormed a list of tips that we called “Moss’s Wisdom for Wonderful Writing.” (Despite this sounding somewhat show-off-ish on my part, it was, in fact, a list that the kids generated, based on our lessons over the past two years.) I’ve attached the list at the bottom of this article for those interested in reading it. Just click on “Read the rest of this entry” and then scroll down.
We are also working on FINALLY finishing the “First Story” project – a wonderful tale that will be the first book I read to Charlie. It’s several months past my expected “due date” of completion, but I can live with the delay since it’s a result of extra thought, revising, and learning. I think it’s been a great learning experience for the kids. Now I just need to get them to hurry up and finish the illustrations so we can be DONE! (There’s a limit, after all!)
I’m particularly excited with our recent work in math. In the week before the CMTs, the fourth grade teachers identified a common weakness among students: probability and mathematical applications. Math applications is the hardest area of math for the kids because it isn’t a skill unto itself. Rather, it is a kind of mathematical thinking in which kids need to apply their skills from any of the different areas of math and USE their understanding to solve an elaborate, open-ended story problem. Math application problems often have multiple steps and require that students keep their logic organized if they are to be successful. As you can imagine, it’s hard to teach kids to appropriately solve a math problem that could use any skill in any form. So I instead reviewed with the kids a series of strategies that they can use when working on a math application problem.
Working on probability has just been plain, ol’, fun for me! It’s odd that I like probability so much since it is based so heavily in fractions, and the kids know that fractions were NEVER my friend growing up. Perhaps my love of probability comes from the fact that it’s always applicable to a very REAL situation. (Concrete skills are ALWAYS easier for kids than abstract or theorectical concepts.) We spent a week talking about probability, and although it left us behind the other classes in beginning unit 7 in math, it let us race through the first several lessons in the new unit since unit 7 teaches (you guessed it!) fractions and probability! We’re having a lot of fun working through the new skills!
While we’re talking about math units, please allow me to apologize for the excessive delay in getting you the results from the recent math unit assessments. I got backlogged, and I never got around to sending the data home. I’m sorry for the delay and will absolutely get you the results this week. Since I may not be around for the unit 7 test, please know that all the grades at PGS are switching to a new score sheet that looks similar to the ones you receive unit by unit, but this new sheet will save paper by putting units 7-12 all on one page. (Think back to the math profile sheets that you received last year. It’s a return to that format, but with the new scoring rubrics that we’ve been using this year in math.)
Science and social studies have been on the back burner lately. We’ll be resuming both next week. Social studies isn’t often taught in discrete lessons and is instead integrated into other lessons in reading, writing, and math. However, you’ll see a permission slip for a field trip going home tomorrow. We’re going to the Noah Webster House, and the kids will be learning about this Connecticut hero in library class with Mrs. McCabe.
There’s probably more that I can share with you, but it’s getting late, Charlie will probably be up soon, and I have a staff meeting early tomorrow morning. Have a good evening!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
March 1, 2010
Two Digit Long Division
Today, we worked on two digit long division in which kids divided larger numbers by two digit divisors. (For example, 12 into 387.) This was a challenging application of long division, but I was impressed by how well the kids did with the advanced content. Because the CMTs start tomorrow, I am not going to give an extra homework assignment to practice this skill, but I wanted to provide you with a resource to help your child if he or she seems to need it. If you would like to review the process we used, this website summarizes the steps we follow. Remember, we also use the phrase “Does McDonald’s sell cheese burgers?” to remember the steps involved: Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Check, Bring down, and Ask yourself (?). Hope this helps!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss