Homework Information

Your child should be reading a book of their choice each night at home, for 30 minutes or more. They should also spend 5 to 10 minutes sorting their spelling words (see Curriculum page for more info.)

Most nights your child will not have additional homework. Each day they will have an independent task to complete, related to our unit of study, but most of the time they will be able to finish these tasks during the day. However, if they do not use their time wisely, or need a longer chunk of time, they will be responsible for finishing work at home. I will send home an overview of these tasks each week to help you stay in touch with what we are working on in class. Those overviews will also be posted on Dojo.

Along with independent Expedition tasks, students will be working on assignments related to their guided reading group. They will be given time to work on these assignments during the day, but may occasionally need to bring home work to finish. If you are noticing that your child is consistently bringing work home, it may be time for a conversation about time management and setting priorities!

Independent work is meant to help your child practice key skills, prepare for class discussions, and make connections between ideas. It will be checked for completeness, accuracy, and thoughtfulness.

I use a four-point grading scale, ranging from 1 (far below expectations) to 4 (above expectations) for most classwork and some homework, as well as assessments and report card grades. You may also see check-minus (incomplete or inaccurate), check (mostly complete, needs some work), check-plus (solid effort, complete work), and plus (above expections) used on homework pages -- these symbols offer feedback so that students may set goals for improvement if needed, but indicate that I have not included the score in my grade book.