It is very important that your child come to school prepared and ready to learn every day, unless he/she is ill. Many new skills, concepts, and information are learned each day. Information that is missed, will be taught and reviewed with your child upon his/her return.
Homework is an important part of our instruction. It helps reinforce skills and concepts learned in class, and it allows us, as teachers to assess what your child understands and how to direct our instruction. Homework is given each night. Reading 20 minutes each night is a MUST! We will be doing a lot of reading in class, building on skills already learned, and learning new strategies to answer a variety of questions about texts. Your child may read to you, you may read together, or read with another person. Spelling and Math homework is also given. Projects and other homework assignments for Social Studies and Science may be given as well. Please see you child's homework sheet each night for the homework. **Please note: There is a spot for a parent signature each night. This ensures that you have seen/checked your child's completed homework. If all homework isn't completed, your child will not earn a point on their point chart, and will have to complete it during recess or homework the next night. Please call or send a note if there are any issues or concerns that you may have.
Students will be graded in the following subjects: ELA (English Language Arts)-Reading, Writing, Spelling; Math, Social Studies, and Science. Attendance will be taken for each subject. Classwork, homework, projects, and reports will all be graded using standard grading (0-100% or A, B, C, D, F). These grades will be recorded in the SchoolTools grading system. You will be able to monitor your child's prgress and grades by using the parent portal beginning on or around November 1, 2012. If you have any questions or concerns about how your child is doing, please feel free to contact us. We will let you know if there are any concerns, as well.
We set up classroom rules and expectations on the very first day of school. Children must be respecful of others, raise their hand to share ideas, walk in the classroom and hallways, be kind to others, and make good behavior choices (keep hands/feet to self).
In order to monitor positive behavior in our class, we set up a point system. Each child has a picture template to place earned points for each subject/special area in school. If your child has completed work in a timely manner/stayed on task, etc., your child will earn their full point(s). At the end of the day, the number of points that your child receives will be counted and reported to the teachers. These points are recorded and used to determine who receives a prize from the prize box and participate in the monthly party at the end of the month. Parents will be notified about their child's day on the weekly homework sheet sent home in their child's homework folder. A checkmark will be placed next to the kind of day he/she had (excellent, good, needs improvement, poor, unacceptable). Consequences include: losing all of the monthly party or part of it, losing computer lab time, written consequence (ex. letter of an apology), lunch detention, or a referral to our principal, Mr. Palmer. Comments may be written on the homework sheet. Please feel free to call, email, or write a note if there are any questions or concerns. It is important to us that we all work together to make this a a great year!! 
We also have a district wide program to encourage positive behavior called, PBIS. Our class earns points from exhibiting positive behavior in the classroom and hallways, lunch/recess and specials. We keep track of our points on a chart in our classroom. Once our class earns a total of 60 points, our class votes on a reward (playing board games, extra gym time, extra cmputer time, extra library time, homework pass, etc.). Check back to see when we reach our goal!!