October 5

Welcome to a new member of the Blogging Group...Rebecca's Mom. That means we have Courtnie, Max, Jason, Tenney, and Rebecca joining the Green Ranks. I will try, maybe have your students remind me that I will only have to send home 22 paper copies. Think of the trees I will be saving. Thanks for your comments because that lets me know you have read the Gillespie Gazette and I can credit your student.

Homework tonight is page 46 (problems 1-15) I am not sure what it has to do with math...but whatever. We are suppose to teach about Venn Diagrams so I did my duty.

I hope your child is excited about decorating their pumpkins. I REALLY want to win that pizza party!

County Report is due this Friday. Parent volunteers please be in the classroom by 9:00 on Friday, Oct. 8 so I can line you out for our County Fair jobs.

I am hoping that I can do a better job of explaining my grading system for any of you parents that are accessing Skyward and are confused. Let's discuss math first. I assign the students a review page for homework, to give them extra practice and one on one support from parents as needed. Then when the students come to school the next day, they grade their own papers and give themselves a score after I read off the answers. I then tell them their percentage score which they are supposed to write at the top of the page. Then the students are invited to know that if they scored below 70%, they are invited to stay in the next recess and let me help them understand the math concepts that they messed up on. I then call on one student (randomly selected) to come show me his/her homework and I check to see how he/she did, check to see if he/she graded it correctly and then enter the score into the math homework section under math in Skyward. If there is no grade next to your child's name, that simple means that he/she has never been randomly selected by me yet. The date of August 31 is the date that I first set up the "math homework" assignment...but I have graded twelve or more students since that day. They have opportunity and encouragement to fix their mistakes and bring it back to me fixed and I will then change their low score to 100% ( I will not bother to change grades until they have fixed all problems to 100%) This is what I do with the students that attempt to do their homework. If they made no attempt and then get randomly selected...I give them a score of 1 (out of 100) because Skyward doesn't allow me to give a zero for some reason. Then the student is encouraged to do the assignment to a 100% and then I only put in a score of 70 because they hadn't even tried to do the homework until they found out I was going to score them. I count it as "late" and they cannot get full credit for the late turn in, but 70 points is way better than one point. If your child has not been scored for homework yet, they have an * next to their name and if they never get scored (highly unlikely) by the time it is Report Cards, I will plug in 100 points and just suppose they have been doing well on their homework this entire term. If you notice in their math notebooks that they have been scoring low on lots of homework assignments, please help them or encourage them to get help from me so we can reteach them the concepts. Hope this helps clear up any confusion.