Tuesday, September 22, 2015 Week 5

Bloom's Taxonomy

Happy Tuesday! Once again the weather dips below 90 and I am able to get out an email.

If I don’t send out an email and you are curious what went down today and a great probability that that night’s homework went down, you can check out this link for today’s date.

Here is today’s specific game plan.

What has been going on?

The biggest news is that on Monday we began strategically rotating every day from 11:45-12:30 Monday through Thursday following the Response to Intervention (RTI) model created under the rollout of No-Child-Left-Behind .  It is one of the five focuses of our district in the 2015-2016 school year, to utilize RTI with regards to our essential standards in L.A. and Math.

If you would like to learn more about RTI?  Here are some great pieces of reading below, since I am not a cable news show I tried to include articles that cover its pros and its cons

This is a great pros & cons of RTI article. A few PHDs even start debating and discussing further in the comments below the article. This is a great starting point.

A straightforward explanation of what RTI is all about.

Cut and dry definition with no cons.

This article addresses that we do not know long term if RTI works and questions some of the "heretical" defense of the system.

This author argues Combining RTI with Cognitive/Neuropsychological Assessment (not light reading)

What does that mean for our class?

It is a loss of about 15% available classroom time where the core community of 27 students are all together. Those 4,500 minutes this will be used on focused essential standards. Therefore we will work even more strategically to cover all of the other curriculum in the remaining 85% of the time so we well-rounded students in the other curriculums.   

What this first breakdown looks like is that some students will be focusing on mastering and improving their fluency in mathematical facts. Students who did not pass the 3 minutes and 50 math fact assessments will be exposed to various mathematical strategies, old-school flashcards and using technology to refine and speed up fluency.  Some students will be focusing on challenging math that expands upon our 5th-grade math knowledge. While another group will be engaging in math project that will have them use the math standards in an open-ended creative way.  The groups are flexible and ever evolving, therefore no one is issued Scarlet Letters and groups will change throughout the year.

Constitution Day -- we were able to have a discussion regarding Constitution day and the students also participated in a two-day competition to learn more about our Constitution while working in teams. About four teams were able to complete the arduous task in the three hours given. Others who did not quite complete it, are encouraged to complete the packet on their own time and earn some constitutional sweets!!

Completing our unit on Inches and Miles -- students were given time today and have until Friday to complete their write-ups regarding the pillars of the pyramid of success. Throughout the process students were given 15 to 25 minutes complete their writeups after we read and discussed two pillars at a time. Some students do not focus or maximize their time therefore this Friday due date may or may not be painful for students.

The Book Project Part of our Monday reflection and journaling has been to tell me how students are doing on their book project. There is an alarming amount of students that say they have not made much progress with their book? I appreciate their honesty, however when they are supposed to read “at least” 30 minutes every night, they should be prioritizing the reading of their book project book.  This is intended to be a well crafted and well thought out book project so they should be giving themselves time to complete the six Bloom’s Taxonomy tasks.

Math

Tomorrow is lesson 3’s test.

As you can see from today’s notes -- we brainstormed the difference between studying and homework. We brainstormed what they could use to study.

Students were told to bring home the green book, their math notebook and the homework packet. They were told which areas and modeled what type of problems to know how to do.

We also spent about 30+ minutes where some worked in pairs studying together, some reviewed their packets together and some chose to watch and practice using Khan Academy.  

Kind regards,

Mr. Hubbard

Homework:

Read for 30 minutes.

You should be working on your book project.

STUDY for tomorrow’s test.

Complete the Khan Academy task assigned to you yesterday (see announcement in the Google Classroom).  

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/cc-fifth-grade-math/cc-5th-fractions-topic/cc-5th-add-sub-fractions/v/adding-fractions-with-unlike-denominators

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/cc-fifth-grade-math/cc-5th-fractions-topic/cc-5th-vis-add-sub-frac-unlike-denom/e/using-visuals-to-add-and-subtract-fractions-with-unlike-denominators-

Brainpop --due by Friday is on Courts

The Monday reflection that you started in class, is due at your earliest convenience.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Stanford's Educator Night on Saturday

If I don’t send out an email and you are curious what happened that day or what should your son or daughter be working on, you can ask them to show you that day’s hyperlink document. They will need to be signed into their Google Classroom account.  Their google classroom will always have the most up to date assignments and what they did that day however this is a rough outline of what we worked on today.

You can get about a 80% look at what we did by looking at our daily game plan.  You can also try accessing it here.

• The times do change and they are not always 100% accurate because learning is dynamic and a human endeavour. Plus sometimes we add things as the day goes along.

Big things of note:

A great circle time. The students did an amazing job of listening to each other and did not side track talk for about 22 of the 27 students that shared. That is great progress. Students shared what happened this weekend, shared who was the “big dawg” in the house (the parent most likely to say, “no” to requests) and we played a brain energizing game.  

.  

Mindset is all about “YET” If you didn’t master it with an 80%, you just haven’t learned it or practiced it enough YET. We discussed this in our brains week. Studies prove that students that understand the brain and see their intelligence as something that is cultivated and grown outperform those that believe their intelligence was predetermined by Zeus or the “Math Fairy.” Not only that students with a growth mindset handle conflict and setback more successfully as they understand conflict and defeat is part of our heroic journey towards learning.

So this lead to a discussion on the importance of our math test corrections and error analysis worksheet. We are going to use this to improve upon our learning when completing our weekly and lesson assessments.  Students will have time during their morning work and during our math breakout times to work with myself or research independently why they made a mistake on the original assessment or what do they still need to learn.  

Brainpop

I assign the Brainpops and give the students time to watch and take the quizzes. I will then run the report the evening or morning they are due. Students that didn’t finish initially will receive a M on their grade. However they should take the quiz at their earliest convenience. I do not mark down for a late completion and a student may watch the movie more than once and retake the quiz more than once. They need to send me an email or show me their “My Brainpop” page that shows they completed the quiz and their score.

Monday Free-Write

20 minutes, no holds bar, write on the topic. Do not worry about grammar or spelling, focus on the skill of writing and creating. They then meet up in small groups and discuss each other’s ideas and the details that they covered.

Daily Vocabulary and Weekly Vocabulary Assessment..

4 words per week. They will have a day each to focus on the words. Then on Fridays they are given an opportunity to share out that they know what the words mean.

This week:  typical and the three different ways we use the word “standard”

Try and challenge your son or daughter to use those words throughout the week.

The common core gods do not approve of the use of bunny with place value. 

Math Lesson 2 sub lesson 4

More work with these concepts:

*10 *100 and *1000

/10  /100 and /1000

Decimal place moves to the right when you multiply by 10, 100 or 1000

Decimal place moves to the left when you divide by 10, 100 or 1000

10*10 = 102  = 100

1.4 = 1.40 = 1.4000 = 1.4000000000000000

The test on Lesson 2 is tomorrow. Students are strongly encouraged to study their green book and review their homework packet.

Both the green book and their homework packet will be collected tomorrow.

Scootpad

We successfully signed into Scootpad today.

We will be using www.scootpad.com for language arts/grammar, some math and we may try out their newly created “adaptive” spelling.

Homework for the evening:

Read for 30 minutes and have the day planner signed off that they did it.

Work on your large arduous book project

STudy for the math test tomorrow. Review your green book for Lesson 2 and review your homework packet.  Make sure you understand the various concepts covered in both.

Due Thursday completed Math Test Corrections/ Error Analysis Worksheet for problems missed in

1. End of Fourth Grade Assessment
2. Week 1 end of week daily common core math test
3. Lesson 1 Quiz

If you did not yet earn 45 or more on the district fluency - this practice your X and division.

Kind regards,

Mr. Hubbard

Go Niners!