Letter
September 23rd, 2010
The first few weeks of school we have been assessing your children in order
to gather information that will help us evaluate strengths, weaknesses, rate
and level for your child.
After gathering that information we have a variety of differentiating
strategies to meet individual needs, here are examples of things we will do:
Compacting
Questioning strategies
Tiered instruction
Flexible grouping
Ability and interest grouping
Independent project work
Acceleration
Higher level materials
We continue assessing throughout instruction to best meet your child’s needs.
Our curriculum is guided by PPS TAG standards and ODE standards for Fourth
Grade.
In math the PPS 4th grade beginning of the year assessment. In
addition, I have given a variety of skilled math sheets. When a 4th grader
masters a skill they then advance to the next skill. I have also conference
with each student to determine their skip counting ability. I check in with
them every few days to see if they need to continue practicing their number
or if they can move up.
The next step once their skip counting is mastered are flash cards. They will
first practice multiplication and then move to division and then square
roots. For our multiplication unit I have designed three different packets at
different skill levels. Kids are working on the packet at their level.
n science kids were given a start of the unit assessment on what prior
knowledge they had. We also used a KWL chart to determine what kids already
knew, questions they had and what they wanted to learn. Throughout the unit
I look at their science journals, experiments and observations in class.
For reading I do a vocabulary reading called San Diego Quick which gives me a
grade level for reading. We also have taken the baseline Scott Foresman test
and just completed a post test on our very first reading.
Please check out the various math links we have set up. These games are
great because they work on the skills we are working on at school. You can
adjust the level of the game so that kids can customized the game for their
own learning level. The current math games are under the icon multiplication
and division.
Internet Links
Websites for Teachers.
http://teacherweb.com
Other Resources
Here are some other resources that you can't find on the internet.