Week 5

Dear Parents,


I hope you all had a relaxing Labor Day weekend with your families! Personally, I was a bit disappointed by the hot weather, but I spent a lot of time playing with my dog and catching up with my friends.

This week there are no tests in math and science, but we do have a few other things happening. On Wednesday, we have our MAP standardized testing. This means that students will have a slightly different schedule during the day, and time will be taken from science and writing to accommodate the testing. However, they will be released at their normal early release day time.

Deficiency notices will be sent out at the end of this week to parents of students with a D+ or lower in any class. In a few cases, a student may receive a deficiency as a result of recently failing a test or neglecting to turn in a few recent assignments. In this case, the deficiency can be as much of a surprise to teachers as it is to parents. However, most students who receive deficiencies are students who have been struggling significantly throughout the quarter. If that is the case, you will most likely have been contacted about their struggles before now, so it should not be a surprise.

 I know this can be a tough time of the quarter for parent and students, but the deficiency system is intended to provide an opportunity for struggling students to improve their performance before the end of the quarter.We are here to work with you to help your students improve! If you are concerned about your student, especially if they have received a deficiency, we will be happy to set up a meeting to discuss how we can help your students. We will also have several afternoons at the beginning of second quarter set aside strictly for parent-teacher conferences,

One more important thing occurring this week: we have our very first seminar in literature class! Seminars are at the heart of a Great Hearts education: they are an opportunity for students to to discuss their ideas about what they have read with each other. The students get to work as a team to discuss what the book they have read means, and they get to do so with minimal direct input from their teacher. The teacher's role is to ask interesting questions; the students do their best to answer the questions using examples from the book they have read and building on each other's ideas. During a seminar, the students speak to each other, not the teacher, and they learn from each other, not directly from the teacher.

The seminar will have more weight than an ordinary class or assignment in the student's grades, for which reason we have been preparing them for a few days. They have been sent home with worksheets asking them to think about what makes someone a good king in "Prince Caspian" and also what role belief plays in the actions and decisions of the characters of "Prince Caspian." They will be allowed to take any notes they make about the story on these papers into the seminar with them.

As a parent, the best thing you can do is simply discuss the story with your student. Ask them about the story, the characters, parts they like, which characters were good or bad, etc. You don't have to discuss the specific seminar questions with them; just get them talking and thinking about the story.


As for grades, we are not expecting the students to be geniuses or mini literature professors; what we most want to see in seminar is students who are working as a team, responding to each other's points and not interrupting each other. These matters of classroom etiquette will set them up for long term success with the seminar method.

These are all the notes I have for you this week. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please send me a message through your Jupiter Ed account.

Sincerely,


Miss Wycklendt