Last Friday during reading buddies Mrs Speece asked us if we would like to come along and help 2JS with their science work. They are learning about air so we made some kites and the kids took them outside to see how well they would fly. It was a great collaborative effort where students learned about patience, teamwork and perseverence.
I have recently added the google calendar function to my blog. It appears to the right of this post and should be a useful tool for parents and students. Please keep an eye on events in the near future and add them to your diary or your own calendar.
I can’t believe it is nearly the end of the first quarter of your child’s fifth grade. As I have said earlier, the group have really gelled well. We have 9 boys and 9 girls and I really hope we can maintain the class for the whole school year. So often in the international school system changes occur that mean families have to move away suddenly and it is always difficult for those involved. When you have a class that get along as well as 5KP do, you really want to keep things just the way they are.
The students are encouraged to wear their house shirts tomorrow as it is the start of the A.P.A.C. (Asia Pacific Activities Conference) tournament in the morning and we will be taking a break from our IOWA schedule and going along to cheer for S.A.S.
Hi Parents and Students,
The students are testing for IOWA as I write this and they are all here and look to be feeling calm and confident. Good Luck 5KP. 
STANDARDIZED TESTING INFORMATION FOR PARENTS
Students in grades 3 – 8 will be taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills during the week of October 20th-24th. (Friday the 24th is also United Nations Day here at school and we will be using that day as a make-up day for any students who may have missed a day during the week.)
Shanghai American School provides many different sources of assessment throughout the year. One source of information is our program of standardized achievement testing. The test series we use, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, is a norm-referenced test. This means that a student’s scores indicate how he/she compares with a representative sample of peers (the norm group). This gives us an idea of how our students’ academic achievement compares to students at public and private schools from the United States and other international schools.
The following is a list of subject areas students are evaluated in:
· Vocabulary
· Reading Comprehension
· Language: Spelling, Capitalization, Punctuation, Usage and Expression
· Mathematics: Math Concepts and Estimation, Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation, Math Computation
Reading comprehension includes: understanding factual information; drawing conclusions; inferring feelings of characters; and determining topic, viewpoint, attitude, structure, and style.
Math Concepts and Estimation includes: numeration and operations; measurement; fractions, decimals, and percents; and equations and inequalities.
Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation includes: single step addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems; multiple step problem solving strategies; reading amounts; comparing quantities; and interpreting relationships.
Important Suggestions and Reminders:
· Students should get a good night’s sleep and eat breakfast before coming to school. There will not be a great deal of homework given out during this week.
· It is important to remember that any individual’s test score is only a measure of how well he/she performed on a single assessment on a given day. The score may be different another day due to testing conditions and the physical and/or emotional state of the individual student.
· The IOWA is only one source of data the School uses to measure student achievement.
On most days of the school year I hear the following comments; often within the same five minutes…”yeah, we have no homework!””man, there is so much homework” “I have too much homework” “we hardly have any homework” “I am never going to get all my homework done”” I wish we had more homework” “my mom says I have too much homework”…you get the picture?
Here is a snapshot of homework in 5KP…
Students may or may not have homework for P.E., Music, Art and Chinese: that is out of my control.
I expect that each child should be reading for around 30 minutes every night. This of course depends on the rest of their schedule for that evening and as many of the students love to read, this is often not a problem. It would be ideal if on a couple of nights a week they are able to read aloud to another person in the house, preferably a parent and that the parent then asks them some questions such as what do you think will happen next? Why did that happen? What does this mean? When parents engage like this with their child it helps the child on many levels, I think the most important one is that the child knows their parent is taking the time to show some interest in their son/daughters reading development but it also reinforces some of the skills they need for school, especially for tests such as the D.R.A. that they recently completed and that they will take again in 6 months time.
During most math units there will be a study link 4 nights a week. There should always be math revision over the lesson and some students have work from class to finish off at home. Many students were disappointed with their unit two math test result, however the class average was the same as unit 1, 83%: half the class improved on their score, three students earned the same score and more students scored over 90% than last time. I hope they spent some time going over their test with you last night as we spent a full period going over their responses yesterday.
Every week the students have two spelling units to complete between Monday and Friday. This levels out to one page of spelling/grammar/word study per night and as I showed the students in class yesterday, there are some great sites to enhance the spelling program such as spellingcity.com which is included in my blogroll. The emphasis in our spelling program is not on weekly drills and spelling tests but rather on fostering an interest in language and its origins and trying to add to our own vocabulary through discovering new words and learning to understand their meaning.
For language arts class your child may be writing or reviewing the unit we are doing in class. Often they will have drafting work to complete. I encourage the students to try and focus on a couple of ways to improve each time they draft, for example one night could be spent working on sentence fluency and word choice and another night might be about adding better verbs to their writing.
In Social Studies and Science there will be times during the quarter where there is little or no homework and at other times the students will be working on a project that will take over your spare time as well as your living room! The trick at these times is to work on balance and time management and of course not leave things to the last minute.
Technology homework is always an option. There are nights when I will set writing or researching tasks for the students to complete on their blog. I am well aware that access to a computer and a working network are not always possible and I ask that the students complete their work on paper if this is the case. I don’t want to set too much homework in tech for this reason however when a child comes home and says that have no homework, this is the first place I would send them. There is always something new being posted on my blog, the 5th grade teachers’ and students’ blogs or out there on the world wide web. They can spend that time, reading, writing or commenting on blogs.
I want the students to have time to play, to rest and to spend time with their family as well as developing a solid work ethic when it comes to school work. It would be great if at this young age they were able to find the happy balance that I am still looking for in my own life! 
In a word…a lot! Oops that is two words, as I am constantly reminding my students, and all the students I have taught before them from middle to high school over the last 16 years; a lot is two words not one! Try and get your kids to think of a lot as a measurement as in a couple, a few, a dozen…it is not a great choice when measuring either so maybe get them to try and abolish it all together. Anyway, that wasn’t what I set out to write about, it just popped into my mind.
Thanks to those of you who came to the weekend b.b.q. I heard that it went well and I know the weather was great. The students only have a couple more weeks until the 1st qauarter ends then it will be one down and three to go, they have made a terrific start to the year and I look forward to what the rest of the year holds for us.
Here are some dates for your planner.
October 12-16th: WASC Self Study Visitation Team
October 13 : Unit Two Math tests are coming home, please sign and return them with your child. We start Unit Three on Geometry tomorrow.
October 20th-24th:IOWA testing for 5th grade each morning during Language Arts
October 24th: End of 1st Quarter
October 24: UN Day
October 30: Last ASA for round one
October 31st: ES Report Cards go home
October 31st: ES Halloween
November 4th – 7th – Book Fair
November 6th – 7th – Parent Conferences
The sun was shining, all the teams showed up and 17 out of 18 of our class were fit to play for the day. It was unfortunate that Izzy wasn’t able to play with us but she is still recovering from her operation to have her appendix removed. Read here for the details of that! Izzy had a great time however helping out with some Pre-K and K classes.
But the rest of 5KP took to the field with gusto playing 6 games back to back. We didn’t always win…but we never lost! A great time was had by all and I was super impressed with the team work, co-operation, good sportsmanship and fair-play demonstrated by all. A special mention to Kyle here who was recommended by a Jordan’s mum as showing excellent team spirit!
We have some fantastic soccer players in our class, some fast students who really go after the ball. Congratulations to our goal scorers and all of you who helped make the day a success. Thanks to the parents who came out and cheered and a special thanks to Samantha’s mum who did about three hours of document scanning for me that morning. You are a life-saver!
Check out some pictures of 5KP and their gorgeous mascot…Miss Mimi!!!
Hello Parents and Students
A wonderful day for all of us coming up tomorrow with our first soccer day of the year…hooray! To make it an even more exciting experience, well, for me anyway…it is also treat day! So send your child in with a water bottle, nutritious and filling packed lunch for soccer day and 5 or 10 rmb to buy a yummy snack. Treats will be available in the middle school cafeteria.
Also, you never know with the weather right now so please make sure they have a hat and also a jacket…be prepared! The class are going along famously right now, I am loving how well they co-operate with each other and their generally happy dispositions. 
Hi Students, please make sure you read the next post, ‘The latest from 5KP’ as that is where tonight’s homework is.
However I also wanted you to check out this site as I think it is full of great information. Something that caught my attention on the site is this ‘ethical dilemma‘ and I would like you to have a think about it too. When I read this pretty typical dilemma I thought you guys might like to go to the comments and add your own so I went to the comments and checked them out, there were 125 at that point. The comments were all full of positive advice and information but I wonder how many people really do those things…
As a teacher and a parent, I was interested to read all of these comments and thought that the kids that posted them were mostly really nice kids who talked about doing the ‘right thing’. However, also as a teacher and a parent, the things the kids talked about doing compared to the things I see students in my playground actually doing were pretty different.
I hope that people do the ‘right thing’ in real life and aren’t just good at talking about it.
How good are YOU at practicing what you preach??? I’d love it if you could
a) post a comment on the ethical dilemma above
b) respond to my question: how good are you at practicing what you preach? Hint don’t double your workload, copy your scholastic response as a response to my blog and why not post about it on your own blog too…
c) feel free to post any other comments on the previous scholastic ethical dilemmas, there are some interesting ones on there
Hi Parents and Students
It is great to see most of you back safe and sound, wonderful to see Izzy again with us and hopefully tomorrow we will have Willow back too.
Soccer Day
Thursday 9 October is the grade 5 soccer day. The main focus of the soccer is participation, fun and getting to meet other fifth graders from around Shanghai. It is being held right here at SAS Pudong so we hope to see some of you out here to support and cheer on our teams. The first game should start around 10 am.
Visiting Authors
Our two visiting authors this year are Ralph Fletcher and Sheree Fitch. Check out their web sites and get to know them before they come.
http://www.shereefitch.com/about.php
P.T.S.A. Fall BBQ
This Saturday October 11 is the Fall BBQ. We hope that you can all make it out here to enjoy the good food and even better company. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to enjoy this fun day with you as I have other school commitments that weekend.
Homework task for tonight
The students have been working in class on ‘show don’t tell’ in their writing.
Students for homework please post two paragraphs (1 for each sentence) on your blog. You can choose from any of these ‘telling’ statements.
I am hungry.
I am angry.
I am happy.
I am sad.
the barefoot librarian 
