Hi All:
I hope you all had a fun and relaxing break! Thank you very much, to all of you, for sending me off with plenty of Starbucks gift cards, nice notes, and other goodies. I always appreciate your thoughtfulness and generosity. Also, thank you so very much for the support you provided your students on their science fair projects. Every single student turned in a science project on time, and they are quite beautiful! It was fun hearing in-class presentations and seeing how students' projects came to life. As we settle in to our second semester, there are several items of which I want you to be aware. Important Dates to Remember (or Pencil In)
i-Ready Diagnostic Assessment Overall, our class did extremely well on their mid-year diagnostic assessments. In reading, surpassing even the high growth our class made last year, students in our class, on average, made 185% of the growth they were expected to make by the end of the year based on i-Ready's nationally normed growth trajectories, which are incredibly accurate. This is a tremendous accomplishment that simply can't be overstated. The expectation, based on national norms created with data from hundreds of thousands of students across the country, is that students at this point should be 50-60% of the way towards their year-long growth targets, which are in fact rigorous. Our students are 185% of the way there, meaning they surpassed their targets to an extent that some may find bewildering. Ninety percent of the students in our class surpassed their year-long growth target at the halfway point. Our class' growth in reading was far and away the highest in the school, again, and likely is some of the very highest in the nation. In addition, our students' performance was amazing too: this time around, five students tested at the very highest i-Ready level, Grade 8; five tested at Grade 7; three tested at Grade 6; and six tested at Grade 5. In math, too, students in our class, on average, made 114% of the growth they were expected to make by the end of the year, signaling another overall crushing of growth expectations. I will send home individual i-Ready reports either this week or next! It's Not Easy Being Green: Our Project Based Learning Unit (Involving Science, Some Social Studies, and English Language Arts) Our largest and most extensive project of the second semester is going to be a project we started this week on climate change. We've named it It's Not Easy Being Green. Our driving question is How can we, as members of US society, take actions to reduce or reverse the impacts and progression of climate change? In the month or so before break, we worked on understanding the basics of climate change, the greenhouse effect, global warming, and a number of the major factors that interact with climate change globally. We watch a movie, Before the Flood, about how climate change is impacting the Earth, and we also spent a lot of time creating a class mind map of our discoveries. At this point, students have divided into seven groups according to seven big topics we identified, and they are set to begin researching and writing about their topics. In the end, each student is going to write a letter to the United States Congress, or perhaps the United Nations, which will outline findings and make suggestions for action. Also, I would like for students to be able to make their own videos, in their groups, explaining the work they've done. If you have a camera and/or any expertise with video editing, we would love your help! The Know Brainer Event On April 27, our class, or most of our class, is going to participate in a Know Brainer academic trivia event at Hamilton Middle School. This event has been organized by the optimist club which also helps us with our BUG awards. We will field three teams of five to seven kids, at a cost of $25 per team, and hold several practice sessions over the next few months. The kids are very excited about this, so please stay tuned for more updates and information. Math We are about halfway through our year-long math curriculum, and students in my class will be taking their fourth unit test either today or tomorrow. We have been doing a lot of long division, multiplication, and pre-algebra with single variables and exponents. For our fifth unit, we are going to switch gears and begin working with analyzing patterns and rules, which will intersect nicely with our science work. We will then return to more advanced division before closing out the curriculum with geometry. If we finish our curriculum early this year, like we did last year, and we most definitely will, we are going to move into sixth grade standards (instead of a capstone) so that students can get a head start on middle school and leave Southmoor feeling confident in their mathematical abilities! Thanks for all you do. Parker
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April 2019
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