Writer’s Workshop Conference

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This is a small flip camera video we made with students Jackie and Byron today in our Writer’s Workshop session. We are doing this in preparation of Mr Power coming in tomorrow as he will be working with the students on a mini-project on this. The students are working in pairs to conference about the latest small-seed idea they have been working on.

Hooray, we have just uploaded our conferences to the portal and to the student’s blogs so now you can all hear what we have been up to. Check out student blogs to hear some of our interviews.

Book Fair is on next week

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If your child is a book-worm like mine, then you will be happy to know that you may be able to purchase some new books for them next week at our SAS Pudong Book Fair.
It is being held in what we refer to as the ‘Orange Grove Room’ (between the 5th grade cafeteria and the middle/high school library) and our class are going over as a group to look at and buy books between 9.00 and 9.30 on Tuesday the 4th.

You can also buy books yourself anytime during the week and they will still be on sale when you come in for conferences on Thursday and Friday.  I am sending home e mails today with your conference times listed so I look forward to seeing you next week.

Math Success

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Welcome to the second quarter of 5th grade!

Congratulations to 5KP on the results from the latest math test. The class earned a median score of 95% and 15 out of 18 students showed improvement (with one student maintaining his previous high score). Four of the students that showed improvement actually earned their first 100% score for the year.

In the classroom we will keep two charts for math; one of which I have had in previous years; the 100% chart and another which I believe is more relevant for most of the class and achievable for all students; an improvement chart. This will be based on the results of their last test only encouraging the student to try and better their previous score. Of course, students should not feel discouraged if they cannot better their score and it is already in the 90th percentile anyway, this could be due to a number of factors and you cannot improve on 100%! This chart is mainly for the students who are often earning in the 70%-90% range and just need a bit of encouragement.

Well done 5KP for doing so well in our geometry unit.

Good luck with our next unit. Remember that starting today, you are all on the 100% chart, you start with a ‘4’…it is up to you what you do from here but by revising over each lesson at home you have a better chance of success next time around.

Unit 4 is on Division and the skills covered in unit four include:

*divide decimal numbers by whole numbers with no remainders

*write and solve number sentences with variables for division number stories

*find the quotient and remainder of a whole number divided by a 1-digit whole number

* find the quotient and remainder of a whole number divided by a 2-digit whole number

*make magnitude estimates for quotients of whole and decimal numbers divided by whole numbers

*interpret the remainder in division number stories

*determine the value of a variable; use this value to complete a number sentence

*know place value to hundredths

Halloween Preparations

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Dear Parents and Students

Please note the following schedule for the morning of Oct. 31:

Students are invited to come to school in costume on Oct. 31 with a change of clothes if necessary for a successful day at school. You are welcome to attend if you wish however rest assured I will take plenty of photos.

We will “parade” to the MS Gym at 8:30 for a Halloween themed assembly.  Please note approximate parade times:

  • Pre-K 3 & 4 & K will start walking out the doors to the large ES playground at 8:30.  They will be our leaders this year to ensure a slow walk to the MS gym
  • 8:35 First grade will line up behind the kinder classes
  • 8:37 Second
  • 8:40 Third
  • 8:42 Fourth
  • 8:45 Fifth

9:00 ES Assembly

9:30 Back to classes

Reading Buddies Science Lesson

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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.

Calendar

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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.

Iowa Tests of Basic Skills

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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.

Homework in 5KP

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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!