End of the 2nd Week

Happy Friday to all!! We have now completed our second week of school. So far everything seems to be going well. We have been busy getting procedural things done but are quickly getting into the day to day that will continue throughout the year. After the first two weeks, there are a few things that enter my mind.

1. Homework: Every year I hear from many parents how much homework their fourth grade student seems to be getting. I look every year to see what can be done to trim this down so that they are not spending so much time at home doing homework. A certain amount is good, but I agree that kids need time to play and do extracurricular activities. I am working to try to make this a bit easier. There are certain things that are assigned weekly that must stay: Spelling Activities, Geography and starting next week, 15 minutes of reading. Those three are all assigned on Monday but not due until either Thursday (Geography) or Friday (Spelling and Reading). This helps with pacing. Math homework will be given most nights but it seems to be a lot quicker this year. Other than studying, most everything else is work not completed in class. I feel like, as the year progresses and we get more into routine, more work will be completed during classtime. One of our Classroom Essential Agreements is: I will use my time wisely. We will work during the school day to follow this agreement and learn how we can best use manage our time to get the things done that need to be done. I highly recommend doing this at home as well. Timers are good to be set and work within those timelines but please be cautious because we don't want to decrease the quality of work by rushing faster than we need to get something finished. I am noticing that my detention students are typically the same ones from day to day. I have given them this week to get into routine and hopefully fix this before next week. After that, I will be talking with them and contacting the parents to let them know that a habit is being formed. I appreciate all the help that parents do in getting this habit under control. I hope that we can work together to help make homework more managable for our students.

2. Math We have now completed a week of our new math program. It has been really exciting in class to see the students learn new ways of understanding math. We have had several "ah ha" moments together and had some interesting ways of solving problems shared with the class. I look forward to many more of these opportunities throughout the year. I thank the parents so much for their patience with helping the students with ways of solving math problems that they themselves may not be comfortable with. The Student Math Handbook is now available online to help with more difficult ideas. The website is: http://www.pearsonsuccessnet.com. To log on, my classroom is set up with their Cafeteria Numbers as their User Names and abc123 as the password. It is case sensitive so be careful with that. Mr. Rich's blog located on the LCE website is also another great resource for help with the math program at home.

3. Parents This being my 3rd year at LCE, I am realizing more and more how wonderful our parents are. I spent three years at a school that did not have the parental involvement that we are so fortunate to have here at LCE. I just want to thank all the parents for all they do to help their child's school years to be the best years possible. Many of you have spent hours these last few weeks cutting different things. After spending a few hours cutting myself, this means even more to me that parents are willing to help take on that task and get it accomplished. Thank you for all you do.

I realize this is a bit of a lengthy post but I felt the need to write about a few things that have been on my mind today. There are a few more but I will leave you with these for now. Have a great weekend with your children, and I look forward to seeing them on Monday morning!