As we begin the New Year...

Happy New Year!!
I pray you had a blessed Christmas and that your New Year's is equally wonderful.

This blog will serve 2 major purposes.
1.  One last announcement about late work for second quarter.
2.  Some thoughts looking ahead to third quarter.


Second Quarter:  I have almost everything from second quarter graded and recorded.  I have been diligently working over break to get that done. ( I will be finishing 5th grade Explorer reports in the next few days). Any assignment that I do not have is now marked with an M for missing and a 0.
I cannot send out personal statements for each student, so please take some time to visit Educate and check for missing work.  Everything listed is work that was due before break, and the importance of turning it in was discussed in class.

If your student has missing work, I will accept it for a late grade on Wednesday, January 4th.  
After that it is an automatic 50% or remains a 0, if report cards are complete.  If your student completes and assignment on Google classroom they will need to notify me by email so I can grade it.

Third Quarter:

Just a clarification about the grading system that I use for the classes that I teach.  All work is graded on a point system.  Which means that a test worth 25 points is entered as that, just as a homework assignment worth 25 points is entered as that.  I do not weight the tests.
**However all assignments are grouped into a category.  Homework, Tests and quizzes, or classwork.  At the end of the quarter Educate separates the categories, figures a percentage for each and then averages those together. 
This is a great system, because while not weighting tests, it gives emphasis to tests, which there may be less scores for than other work.

My categories include the following:
Homework:  These are any assignments assigned in class, that need to be completed for the next class.  Students may finish it during class time but it is assigned as homework.
Classwork:  These are things done completely in class.  Many of the social studies workbook pages fall under this, or a group activity that we only work on in class would fit here.
Tests and Quizzes:  Any test or quiz given for a subject, even if it is open note/book.

5th grade English grade is made up of 2 homework scores and 2 test scores every week.  I am removing the classwork category, even though we complete a great deal of it in class.
Literature:  This is a combination of all 3 categories.  There will be less test/quizzes scores most quarters, so studying for those is important.
5th grade social studies:  This is also a balance of the three categories.

Hopefully that clears that up for those of you trying to figure out points at home.

Third Quarter Book Report:
It is time!!  We will be completing a book report this quarter.  We will spend some time when we return focusing on reading interest inventories and how to pick a book on a certain reading level.  Students can read anything they want, any genre, as long as it is on their reading level.  It can be a book they recently read - within the last month or two, or a new book.  They will be receiving time in class everyday to read.

I will be giving them several choices on a report type, so that they can hopefully match something to their learning style.
All the directions and due dates will be posted here and on Google classroom the second week we are back.

If they received a new book for Christmas or have one they want to read, they can get started.  I will be checking books after we discuss them a little.


We will not have Spelling and Grammar that short week that we return.  We will begin again January 9th.
Both Lit classes will be working from the textbooks for a while before reading another novel.  6th grade will be doing Historical Fiction, and 5th grade Fantasy.  Both grades will watch the movie that corresponded to the novels we just finished when we return.

God bless your remaining days of break.
Mrs. Brown