VIP folder/ Graded work
Your child will have a folder that comes to and from school each day. I call it the VIP folder (Very Important Papers). Please look through the folder each night.
You can typically count on your child's evaluated assignments to come home in their VIP folder. If you take the time to look through these papers and have a brief discussion or offer compliments and suggestions it will drastically improve the quality of your child's work during the school day. Once they see that you and I consistently care about what they are doing they will be place a higher value on learning. The most impressive professor I had in college told me, "If you want kids to do quality work you must treat it in a quality way."
I grade papers in a variety of ways. Some papers will be marked D.T. or Done Together as a class. This means the work was not independent. If it come home with a star or check mark that means part of it was independent work, but it was not recorded into my grade book. Other papers will come with a number correct/total fraction (example: +4/5). These are graded assignments that contribute to your child's grade on their report card.
Homework
The Homework is sent home every Friday in a special Homework folder. and should be returned on or before the following Thursday. This gives YOU the freedom to manage homework time according to your family schedule. The folder will contain a weekly information letter, the assignment, and the weekly spelling word sort. It is not unusual for the contents of your homework folder to differ slightly than that of other classmates. I try to differentiate based on reading level, spelling ability, math skills, and concepts each student needs to practice.
District Wide Behavior Plan:
Our district is a PBIS system (Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports). This means we model and teach appropriate behaviors and then reward students who are following through. You might be thinking how do we do that. We reward students with TK Tickets. When a staff member wants to reinforce a behavior, the staff person will look for someone who is following the routine correctly and give them a ticket. The student will put their name on the ticket and place it in the lottery bucket. On Fridays, the classroom teacher picks 4 or more tickets, those students get prizes. Then all the tickets are put into the school-wide drawing every Monday. Our principal, Mrs. Wonders, will pick 10 2nd graders and 10 3rd and call them down to the office to pick a prize.
In my class, I use a clip chart and a ticket system. I want to recognize students throughout the day, I will ask them to clip up on the chart. That earns them a ticket. It also prevents me from slowing down my lessons to pass tickets out. Then at the end of the day, anyone who clipped up gets tickets. Tickets are also earned in the hall, recess, lunch, during work time, and small groups... Long story short tickets are a BIG deal.
Communication-
As you know we try very hard to keep parents regularly informed about what’s going on at the school however, sending paper letters home can be rather ‘hit and miss’ with letters often going astray along the way.
I send a weekly update usually on Friday. This will give you a review of the week and the upcoming events. This will go to the email mail address you have in PowerSchool. If you need to make changes to which email address you want school reminders to go to please call the office.
I will update my website, but to be honest I have had very little success with parents checking my website for updates.