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

Permission slips are coming home today for our field trip! Please return it at your earliest convenience. Checks should be made out to FSS Student Activity Fund. Chaperones who have already contacted me should send payment for both parent and child. I will send home information for chaperones next Monday in paper form.

Math facts practice begins this week! Our first quiz will be this Thursday, since there is no school Friday. 

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.

Our reading focus this week teaches students to Back up and reread. As I mentioned on curriculum night, the focus of reading instruction this year is on thinking while we read. It’s the difference between learning to read and reading to learn. Kids often will breeze past unknown words, or misread them and keep going. This week, students will learn to stop when words don’t make sense; don’t look right; or don’t sound right. When reading with your child, prompt them to go back to the start of a sentence and read slower, thinking what would make sense. If they simply don’t know a word and can’t infer what it means, it’s a good opportunity to teach it to them!

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.What’s important at this time is for kids to write sentences that are clear to understand, with some detail and attention to basic spelling, grammar, and handwriting (no backward letters). As before, targeted writing lessons will be given to students to improve clarity; run on sentences; upper/lowercases; punctuation; and editing.