Grade 4...bring it on!

Yes, your kids are almost in Grade 4.  Seems like the school year just began.

Assessments are over.  Doing a quick scan of students' work, I was glad to see lots of correct answers, but I know some questions caused problems.  Even some things that we reviewed, and practiced, and reviewed, and I thought students had them down, caused problems on the assessment. 

I am hopeful that your child's overall results will be good, but when you receive the results in the fall, please don't panic if there seem to be areas of concern.  The kids are still young.  Their brains are still developing.  Some concepts take time for some of us to fully understand. 

I'm not sure, but you may notice a difference between the mark I give your child on the report card and the results of the assessment.  Please keep in mind that I see your children every day and I see them showing and applying their math skills and knowledge in different ways in class, both on their own and when in groups.  That is what I base my marks and comments on and it is very different way of assessing that the Provincial Assessment approach.

We have about 2 and a half weeks left of classes with a field trip and other activities planned during that time period.  The time we spend in math class will be spent practicing multiplication facts, doing some estimating, and general review to keep skills sharp. 

I won't be sending home any more homework sheets.  Thank you for your support in helping your children with these over the last few months.  Please just keep practicing math facts:  addition and subtraction to 18 (or 20) and multiplication and division facts to at least 36.  They will need to be strong with all of these facts in Grade 4 and beyond.

Have a great week!

Assessment Week

Thankfully, we'll only be doing assessments on Wednesday and Thursday, not all week!

Still, our focus for Monday and Tuesday will be to continue with review and to look at bar graphs and counting money.  We'll also count the faces, edges, and vertices of some 3-D shapes the students made last week.

Counting money is a small part of the curriculum, but it is an addition and subtraction concept and a valuable life-skill.  As I've mentioned in earlier posts, coins can be used to practice skip counting.  If you have some change at home, please have your child count it for you.  Discuss how to recognize the various coins and their values.  I'll be using plastic money at school, but being able to handle and count the real thing will be beneficial for your child.  Last week I added two online Canadian money games to the Websites tab.  There were some access problems for most students when we tried them at school on Friday, so maybe they'll work better at home.  They are:

Peter Pig's Money Counter

Money Metropolis

The class average on the practice quizzes we completed over the last couple of months improved with each quiz.  We went from 58% to 81% during that time.  The format of the quizzes is very much like the actual assessments, so I am hopeful that having the opportunity to do those quizzes and discuss some of the answers afterwards has been helpful to students.

I will be sending home a sheet with more practice and review questions on it.  They will be due Friday. 

Hope many of you will make it to Family Fun Night this Friday, June 7th.