Happy Monday!

Hopefully everyone wore their Redskins gear today because I suspect you won't want to wear it tomorrow...

I apologize for not putting a posting up on Friday. I spent a solid two hours throughout the day grading our math quizzes. Speaking of which, as those in my math class will look at tonight, overall we had a tough time with our Friday quiz. In fact, we spent this morning reflecting on our three, guiding questions: what we know, "kinda" know, and don't have a clue on? We discussed our quizzes in table groups and identified consistencies based on these discussions as to which content areas we struggled with. Using this information, we created a plan for the week that should help prepare us to retake a similar quiz this Friday. The purpose of grading is not to catch anyone off their game; rather, it is to clarify what each student understands in a testing environment. With that in mind, I decided not to enter the grade in my gradebook and will provide some additional instruction throughout this week with the expectation that we will demonstrate a better understanding this Friday. Please keep in mind - this is the class where we teach all the 3rd grade content in addition to all the 4th grade challenge items. Consequently, about a third of this quiz was challenge... The pace and content will continue to be challenging, so I discussed with the class the importance of asking questions when something is unclear, paying attention to the entire lesson, and putting in their best effort during independent practice times. Adjustments will be made but the bar is appropriately high in our math class. Tonight for homework, they are to share their quizzes with you, discuss how we used the quiz in class, and complete a patterns worksheet that is directly related to a difficult item from the quiz.

Language Arts time included our first day of spelling. We will establish spelling journals tomorrow but if you came to back to school night, you already got a taste of our two week exploration cycle. We will be working with the long "e" sound - /ee/. In addition to spelling, we worked on the elements of a story using either The Empty Pot or Sea Otter Goes Hunting. As a follow-up, the "Empty Potters" wrote down examples of /ee/ words and underlined the letter patterns that make the sound.

We had our third session with Mrs. Rose today. Our author study of Cynthia Rylant will wrap up on Wednesday but I will pick it up with a novel by her, Gooseberry Park.

That's all for now - enjoy the game tonight!