Learning To Go Mr. Avery's Class on the Web 

Thanks to all who have offered to join us as chaperones on our field trip! There’s still room for one more: let me if you can help out! The permission slip is going home today. Please return it at your earliest convenience, but no later than this Friday. Checks should be made out to FSS Student Activity Fund. Chaperones who have already contacted me should send payment for both parent and child. No need to put contact info: we’ll take care of it the morning of the trip. I will send home information for chaperones next Monday in paper form.

Math facts practice begins this week! Our first quiz will be on Thursday, October 13. This gives students two weeks to get used to the routine. Quizzes will be on subsequent, Fridays, except Nov. 10 due to the Veteran’s Day holiday on the 11th.

Coming home today is 1) a cover letter with explanations and suggestions for nightly homework practice, along with your child’s level,  2) your child’s placement test(s), 3) math fact cards at your child’s level, and 4) two practice quizzes. I recommend at least 5 minutes per night for practice, since practicing for 20 minutes one night per week just won’t help kids retain the information. Quizzes are given on Fridays and returned on Mondays. The timed aspect of these quizzes tends to be the hardest thing to master. You can make additional quizzes by using the websites Math Fact Café (addition and subtraction) andMath Aids (multiplication and division). You can also make fancier flash cards at A+ Math Fact Flashcard Maker. All three websites can be found under the “Parent Resources” section above.

Students will be encouraged and praised for making progress toward the eventual goal of achieving math fact fluency to 10 by trimester one’s end; to 15 by the end of trimester 2; and to 20 by trimester 3 (report card expectations). Students who pass 20 will move on to multiplication, then division.

The website Xtramath.org has proven motivating and helpful for many students. Your child now has an account set up, and you can access it via the link under Student Resources above. It approaches math facts somewhat differently than our weekly leveled quizzes. Students are given a series of online placement quizzes on addition facts up to 10 to start (whereas most students in class have placed out on a level between 5 and 7), and students work with a variety of facts at a time. Still, it can be a fun supplement to weekly practice. The site sends me weekly reports on student progress. If your child has used it in the past, logging in with new credentials sent home today should reactivate their old account so they don’t need to start from scratch.

This week, students are being taught the ins-and-outs of Informative Writing. This genre of writing requires students to organize statements of fact around a main idea, to give examples to evidence their thinking, and to present their argument logically in order. As before, targeted writing lessons will be given to students to improve clarity; run on sentences; upper/lowercases; punctuation; and editing.

In Social Studies, students are learning the big ideas about maps, namely: maps show places; and maps use pictures, a compass rose, orientation, scale, labels, and symbols. We will build a 3-d model of our classroom to investigate orientation, scale, and a sense of space. Then we’ll move to the representational stage and create maps of our room and playground using photographs. There are lots of online learning games to help teach and practice these skills, like this one at National Geographic. In addition, we use Google Earth (requires download) all the time to match places relevant in our learning to our actual geographic location. I highly recommend it!