2013 Report Card Letter
Dear Students and Family Members,
After completing all the report card comments and checks, I found myself amazed at how wonderful the learners in Team 15 are. Students’ perseverance, kindness and curiosity are admirable. I am so proud of each and everyone of them.
The reports demonstrate the following class attributes:
- Students are respectful and caring toward one another.
- In general, students are organized and responsible for all class work and projects.
- Students read at grade level or above, and continue to work to develop their writing skills with regard to essays, stories and reading response.
- Math skills are strong overall and we will continue to work on the collective ability of students to solve math problems, develop concepts, build computation fluency and express their mathematical thinking in words and writing.
Family members can support their students’ development of skills, concepts and knowledge in the following ways:
- Encourage and embrace reading. Visit the library, download digital books, access multiple genres, read together and make reading an important, enjoyable part of your life. Students that read well and often consistently do better in school.
- Converse with each other about academics, world issues, intellectual ideas, friendships and more topics. Make conversation a regular part of your child’s life.
- Play math games and solve math problems together on a regular basis. Talk about math concepts and read math books. Eliminate any fear of math and embrace the topic.
- Build stamina and perseverance. Help your child to creatively and consistently work at endeavors that are challenging with your support and care. Build confidence and a problem-solving mindset, and let children embrace failure and mistakes, and see them as the stepping stones to learning.
- Celebrate and develop your child’s passions and interests. Every child brings unique gifts to life, and those gifts lead children to their friends, careers, recreation and joy.
- Learn together. Visit museums, nature preserves, historical sites, cultural events and a diversity of locations to develop your child’s understanding of his/her world around them. Be a model of learning to your children and choose subjects, problems or topics to learn about together online and off in engaging ways.
As I wrote the report cards, I also short listed the classroom goals for the upcoming semester. Those goals include the following:
- Focused response to the skills, concepts and knowledge for specific students that have been marked as “developing or progressing” in any area of the report card. The teaching team will use RTI, small group instruction, skills labs and other targeted teaching efforts in this regard.
- An effort to build all students’ writing ability--throughout the class, this is an area where children can improve with regard to stories, essays, paragraphs and reading response.
- Continued effort to develop students’ reading comprehension skills through class read alouds and discussions, small book groups and time for independent reading at home and in school.
- Continued development of students’ math problem solving ability, math communication skills both in writing and speaking, math concepts and math computation skill. This is an area where most students show room for development and improvement.
Specific indicators that led report card comments and categories include the following:
- Meeting expectations for math computation meant that students have achieved fluency in facts and computation through addition/subtraction and mostly multiplication (not multiplication with large numbers yet).
- Meeting expectations for reading meant that students read regularly, show grade-level performance on grade-wide assessments and contribute to class discussions.
- Meeting Expectations for writing shows that children can write a story or response from start to finish with evidence of organization, initial grammar/punctuation, writer’s craft and voice.
- Social Studies and science "meeting expectations" meant that children participated in grade-wide projects and learning with care, and those who exceeded expectations completed extra projects and work in those areas.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or concerns regarding your child’s report card. While it’s tough to “rate” children, the report card snapshot serves to provide an overview of your child’s strengths and goals for the first semester. Thanks for your incredible support. As I always say, this is a well-loved class, and that’s a tribute to your care.
Sincerely,
Maureen Devlin
