Week 11

Dear Parents,

It was good to meet with so many of you in conferences and talk about how to help your students succeed. There were a few of you we didn’t get to meet during conference week, but conference week is certainly not the only time we can meet with you! If you would like to meet with us and you have not yet mentioned it to me or Mr. Ohbayashi, please send us a message through Jupiter Ed, and we will be happy to arrange a time to meet.

A common theme I heard from many of you in conference week is how you are not looking through your fourth graders’ homework in great detail any more. Rather you are going over their homework briefly to make sure your students are completing it, answering in complete sentences, showing math steps, and handing in their work. In this way, you are trying to help your students develop a sense of responsibility for their work. Of course every student and family has different needs. However, developing a more mature sense of responsibility in our fourth grade students is one of the main things we as teachers are trying to accomplish to prepare the students for fifth grade and middle school. It was great to hear that so many of you were on the same page with us even before conference week. Thank you for all your support. This is truly shaping up to be an amazing year.

There were a few questions raised that were also common in conference week, and I will be devoting some space to them in this post and in my next few posts. Probably the most frequent questions were regarding online homework. First, how do you know if students are making progress in the RM system, especially when they are doing homework? My first answer to this question is that accuracy trumps speed. The most important measures of success in the RM program are how many problems the students get right and how challenging the problems they get right are.

These two goals are linked in the system because students earn the right to work challenging problems within the RM system by doing well on the easier ones. Furthermore, the more accurate your students are during a lesson, the less time they have to spend on review in Wall of Mastery. Students who work slowly through a lesson but are very accurate will find that when they get to Wall of Mastery, many of the problem sets in Wall of Mastery are already marked complete, even though they haven’t worked on them yet. This is because a student who is very accurate and careful needs much less review than a student who works too quickly. Basically, accuracy on problems in Guided Study will give students the opportunity to be exposed to more challenging problems in Guided Study and will also reduce their workload in Wall of Mastery.

Please keep in mind, then, that when we discuss the RM program, accuracy should be your main goal for your students. Sometimes, very strong math students actually go through the program more slowly than weaker students because the stronger students are working slowly and accurately and earning the chance to work on more difficult problems while some of the weaker students may be rushing ahead.

Of course, the school year is not infinite and the students do need to complete the program within the year. This is why I mention on my blog what lessons students should be working on in Guided Study, to make sure they do not get behind. I also mention what lesson they should not go past in order to keep them from moving too quickly.

A number of parents have asked me where they should look to figure out what lesson their student is doing. I tried to describe it, but I think the simplest way is just to show you. Please take a look at the following screenshot. In between the red banner that says “Guided Study” and the orange bar labelled “Problem: Level A” there are some very faint letters that say, “Properties of Multiplication.” That is the lesson this student is on. You can always find what lesson your student is working on in Guided Study by looking at the fain letters directly beneath the banner. I’m sure you find them annoyingly faint. I agree, but unfortunately, I can’t change it.

If your student is working in Wall of Mastery instead of Guided Study, the words “Wall of Mastery” will appear at the top of the screen instead if “Guided Study.”

Notice also the words “Level A” on the orange bar at the top of the screen. That refers to how challenging the problems are. Level A is easiest, Level B is medium, and Level C is most challenging. All students start with A level problems, but if they get at least 70% of them correct, they earn the right to work on B and C level problems.

This week, students should be starting on the lesson, “Column Multiplication by a One Digit Number” on Monday night, if not before. If they are not on this lesson by Monday night, they are behind their class. They should not go past the objective “Column Multiplication by a Two Digit Number.” If they are past this lesson working on “Formulas for the Area and Perimeter of Squares and Rectangles” or anything related to division they are too far ahead! They should go to Wall of Mastery.

One note on discipline for the week: We have had repeated problems with students taking the sticky-tack off the name-tags on their own desks and off the name- tags on other students’ desks. This is destructive and disrespectful to classrooms which all the students share. The name tags are necessary, and it is impossible to get them to stick on the students’ desks with anything else like tape. (We have tried.) Taking the sticky-tack is really stealing whether the students realize it or not. It is expensive and we can’t keep replacing it. Further, when the name tags fall on the floor they sometimes end up getting destroyed. Students end up using the sticky-tack/putty as a toy with which to distract themselves in class, which is another problem. Several students who have been playing with sticky-tack/putty in class have claimed that they brought it from home. However, as name tags are repeatedly found on the floor stripped of sticky-tack, it is becoming obvious that students caught playing with sticky-tack are not getting it from home.

We have addressed the problem several times with both classes, but Mr. Ohbayashi, our dean of students, has decided that from now on students who caught playing with stick-tack/putty at school will receive an automatic detention. Students who take sticky-tack/putty off the name tags on the desks will also receive an automatic detention. While I think it is unlikely that any of the students are actually getting the sticky-tack/putty from home, if they are please have them stop because from now on they can receive a detention for bringing it. We are sorry to have to resort to drastic measures in this case, but we are hoping that the prospect of a detention will deter students without us actually having to give them a detention over sticky-tack.

In science, we will be studying electricity and magnets for the rest of this week and most of next week. After that we will move into states of matter and geology. The students will be assigned a geology project to be completed at home during the first week of their study of geology (three weeks from now). They will be making a model of the layers of the earth as their science homework for that week. This should hopefully be fun and it will help to give them a physical connection to something they can’t see. It is also great exposure to different ways of thinking scientifically; scientists often build models to help them understand facts and theories better.

 If you would like to start shopping for supplies for the science project early, here is the list: 1. A can of red play-dough  2. A can of yellow play-dough  3. A can of orange play-dough  4. A can of black play-dough  5. A can of blue play-dough  6. A metal or metal-looking bead at least a ¼ inch in diameter (to be the earth’s iron core)  7. A black Sharpie for writing labels   8. A green Sharpie

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

Sincerely,

Rebecca Wycklendt