It Has Begun

Signatures: As you may have noticed after this first week of school, parent signatures play a significant role in not only our classroom, but in Mrs. Krueger's and Mrs. Tanksley's grade four classrooms as well. We all feel that our students' success in school improves when their parents are active, engaged, and aware of the goings on at school as well. Therefore, you will find your children coming home quite often this year with various projects, assignments, and activities for you to read through together and for you to sign off on.

Project Criteria Sheets: Almost all the major projects we do have criteria sheets that break down the various tasks involved in completing the project. Since these projects can be complex and can take anywhere from a week to a month to complete, we like our students to take the criteria sheets home to read through with their parents and sign. We always go over the criteria sheets together extensively at school and refer back to them constantly until the project is complete. Therefore, it's important for students to have these with them at school.

Our first criteria sheet, Cereal Box Project, should have made it's way home for you to read through and sign this weekend. This project, like most of our projects, has many parts that add up to one completed whole. Due to the opened ended nature of such projects, we typically do not set a due date for the entire project at the beginning. Rather, we break it down into parts with individual due dates for each part determined in class and then we set an overall project due date based on student progress once we've made some headway. That said, all students are expected to meet all due dates unless there are extenuating circumstances. The first aspect of our Cereal Box Project is a personal timeline, which is why the kids were asked to brainstorm some ideas for their timeline with you over the weekend.

Daily Planner: This is a hugely important resource for our class this year. Students use it everyday to record both what we did in class and what is expected for homework. Your child's Daily Planner should look very similar to the Daily Planner you can find on our blog under the School Survival heading. On Thursday each week they fill out Skill to Support Lifelong Learning section and ask for your signature. I see this as another time for you to connect with your child's learning. Their planner should be neat and legible. And, they should be able to explain every aspect of it. If they're having trouble completing work or forgetting things it usually means they're not completing or using their planner correctly.

I hope this helps with some of the questions you may have had this first week of school. I think we had fun and productive first week. I've been very impressed with the overall make-up and effort of our class. I think we're in for a great year. Remember, we have Curriculum Night September 30th. Please do not hesitate to get ahold of me if you have any questions or concerns.

Mr. Schwindt