November 16th, 2007

Report Cards

You will receive an information sheet to help you interpret the 1-4 grading scale. We wanted to provide you with a little more insight into the English Language Arts portion of your child’s report card. We hope this helps you get a good sense for your child’s progress, especially since we won’t see all of you at conferences. As always, please feel free to get in touch if you have questions. We still have conference times available. Please use the link at the end of the letter to sign up.

Beginning to mid-grade 2 is our reading benchmark for this trimester. It would not be fair to assume immersion students would start the first year of English at grade level. Second trimester we assess at a beginning to mid third grade level and by the end of the year we assess at grade level. The fluency and accuracy grades are calculated by listening to a student read a passage aloud one-on-one. We time the reading to calculate correct words per minute, listen for appropriate expression and count decoding errors to arrive at the accuracy rate.

Comprehension questions are also a part of this assessment. These, in addition to work from our Houghton Mifflin curriculum, were used to calculate the comprehension grade. Again, mid- grade 2 is the benchmark. The grade on selecting appropriate independent reading materials reflects the work habit of settling in with a book and using this time well for reading practice.
Our main focus in writing has been to establish the routines and expectations of Writer’s Workshop. Students have been introduced to all elements you see on the report card, but have not had adequate practice to measure for an assessment. The one grade you will see in writing reflects a student’s ability to embrace the task and generate writing on that topic. All elements will be graded next trimester.

The weekly spelling test grade comes directly from their word study post tests. We tried to take into account working out the kinks in the system and any time constraints that a particular group may have had on a given week. Because students are taking such a wide range of tests and because our focus in writing has been “brave spelling” to share their ideas, we did not want to penalize students who were embracing that idea. Again, next trimester, as students have worked with a wider range of patterns, have spent more time with a dictionary and have edited work to a final copy, this element will be graded.

Look for good “How to help at home” hints on the blog next week!

Word Study

Thanks to all the volunteers who make the differentiated tests possible! We couldn’t do it without you. There is no test for the week following Thanksgiving. We will be conducting a new spelling inventory to determine new groups. Homeroom teachers are also making new large English groups. We will post the new groups and word study volunteer opportunities on a wiki next week. If you are interested in helping, we would love to see you! We’ll send a quick note with the link when it’s ready! Let us know if you have questions or have trouble signing up. Thanks!

Reading

We will wrap up our unit on Celebrating Traditions and transition to a really fun unit on Incredible Stories! These are always favorites. We will also do some first language reading about Native Americans to support the learning in their French homerooms.

Writer’s Workshop

We will continue to work on poetry, polishing at least one piece to publish. We will be in the computer lab on Friday, November 30th to type and format these final pieces. If you would like to help students with basic word processing, please let us know! Many hands will make this a productive time for all! We will include more details with the wiki link, as we do not have the new groups yet. Thanks!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your families. We are certainly thankful for such a great group of kids and all of your support. As always, please be in touch with questions!

Amby and Lynnea