Some Trends from our Conferences, Some Information.

Dear Parents,

Thank you all for your flexibility over the last two weeks with half day, conferences, and progress reports! November is such a busy month! We have been very busy in class as well, however, based on the majority of conversations that I have had with you all over the last two weeks, some of your children have not been as busy at home as you would like, or as you feel they should be.

First, let me state that all lessons, work, homework, and projects, are supposed to be written down in their planner every day. I reserve 15 minutes of every afternoon to write these things down.  It would take me 15+ minutes to also check every assignment written down by every student, and many days I simply do not have the time. I will attempt to hold students accountable better at school, however, it is important that your child know that you also expect them to come home with this information.

In order to help you and your students keep track of assignments, I am looking into a few options:

1- adding "guardian email addresses" to your child's google classroom account. This will send periodic emails with work and grades that your child has been given on assignments. It will also notify if your child has not turned in an assignment. I have to enter these in individually, so I will work on doing that next week.

2- researching a way to post or display the lessons and assignments online, every day. I have to confirm with our Technology department, on whether I am allowed to set up a twitter feed or something that parents can choose to follow, where I can post images of our planner and/or notifications of assignments every day.

3- I will be emailing all of you with the login credentials for the student login for our math curriculum. If your child is not bringing math homework home, even if it is finished, you can easily access the worksheets that I assign online and print out another copy. There are also practice pages in each of the lessons in the student textbook, which is in PDF format for students to view as well as videos and power point slides of each of the lessons.

One of the reasons that kept me from making all of this information available earlier, is because I do not hear from many of you. While my last blog post had 48 views, the rest of my posts have only been viewed by about half of my families.

Just like students, I put my energy into what seems important to all of you. If families are not interested in keeping up with the goings on in the classroom, then I will divert my efforts to other tasks to help your children be as successful as possible.

A majority of you have indicated over the last two weeks that a communication of assignments and due dates is important to you. Therefore, I will do my best to keep you all as updated as possible.

One important due date coming up is your child's November Book Project. This assignment is due This Monday, December 2nd. Your child was assigned a "free choice" to show the underlying themes or lessons in a Realistic Fiction book. Themes can include: the author's message, a lesson learned by the character, problems or the solutions to a character's problems that are apparent in the book. Students can show this understanding in any way that fits them, there are several suggestions in the assignment packet in the reading section of your child's binder.

I have said many times this year: I would rather your child turn in a quality project late, than a sloppy project on time. If this book report was "news," then I recognize that they may not have a book read and a project done by Monday. I do expect that these projects show care and effort. It is highly recommended that these projects be worked on in little pieces at home throughout the month.

As always, please feel free to contact me with questions.

Regards,

Mrs. Hart