February home projects were so much fun! Thank you for continuing to support your child with their homework. If they have not yet completed the “I wonder..” projects, please help them to complete these as soon as possible. March home projects are in relation to Africa. Last week the students spent time exploring animals, plants, foods, countries, landmarks, etc found in Africa. Your child may choose any topic relating to Africa. Reminder that your child will need a written product completed with each home project. If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to email me.
Category Archives: Home projects
International Festival!
International Festival is coming soon! I would like all projects, for the festival, in class by the 15th, that is in two weeks! I have asked your student to talk with you tonight about confirming their project idea. Please have your child prepared with their final project idea by tomorrow. Remember, they can choose anything related to South America (country, animals, food, monuments, etc.) If I do happen to have too many students who pick the same topic, we will need to have a back up idea, I will only allow 2 for each topic. This rarely happens, but it is possible. We want our classroom to present a variety from South America. These projects are required for all students and they will need a tri-fold board to display for the festival. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me.
International Festival
PLEASE READ
My favorite school event is happening in just under 5 weeks. The international festival! Our classroom is presenting on South America. On Friday, students had the opportunity to explore ideas they may be interested in further investigating. Your child may complete a project on anything relating to South America. They can choose a particular country, animal or animals, food, culture, land marks, etc. The sky is the limit. Lower Elementary will be presenting on Thursday, December 17th. Every student will need to have a completed tri-fold presentation board completed by the 15th. (This is the only home project that this board is required). The day of the festival, students are welcome to bring artifacts, food samples, etc. Mark your calendars. Families are encouraged to come and visit all the lower elementary classrooms from 12:30-2:30 p.m. on Thursday. Upper elementary will be presenting on Wednesday the 16th from 9:00-11:00 a.m. You are welcome to come and visit during those times. If you do choose to come, you are encouraged to visit other classrooms with your child. If you have questions, please send me an email.
Home Projects
This first month of home projects have been amazing! The students have really done a fantastic job. If your child has not brought their project for October, please have them bring them this week. It is hard to believe it is already November. I will introduce this months project theme Monday. Students will begin bringing home their October projects this week.
Reminder October Home Projects
Remember, this is the last week of October and home projects are due Friday.
Home Projects
As I mentioned before, we are focusing our home projects around our Zoology studies this month. Students have already begun bringing their projects and are always excited to share the information they have learned with their peers. Home projects are a great transition into helping your child gather information from what they read. Please help your child to read and gather information from books, articles, and the internet. Make certain they are using words they know how to read and understand in their final written work and are not just copying information. If your child is not yet fully reading, please read with them and have them dictate to you what they want to write. Then have them trace over your writing for good practice. Then, they may orally practice and present without notes. This is much more interesting and makes their project their own. Often times student will copy something from the internet and have a friend read it for them. This defeats what a home project is meant to be. Home projects need to have some sort of visual aid and a written paper equal to your child’s ability level. Level 3’s will be encouraged to start typing their reports. They will be expected to type on the SAGE test this year and this is good practice.
LEVEL 1’s -Please help your child find a vertebrate they are interested in. Level 1’s are studying vertebrates all year long. They have begun identifying the different classes of vertebrates.
LEVEL 2’s- Anything to do with the human body. This can include nutrition, exercise, skeleton, brain, etc. Make it fun!
LEVEL 3’s- Any invertebrate of their choice.
This home project is due by the end of the month. Please make this a quality learning experience with your child. We want this to be their work, but they will need some guidance. It isn’t a project you complete in one night, it should be a process, and an enjoyable one.
I have posted the all of the home projects for the year on the blog under pages or you can access it here. If you have questions about home projects, please feel free to ask me during conferences.
Folders
Sorry, I had a meeting at the end of day and although folders are filled and ready to go, they did not get passed back. If you child forget theirs today, please send them to school tomorrow. So, the post about IXL will apply tomorrow. Thanks.
Homework Folders
First, thank you so much for helping your child learn accountability and making certain they are completing their nightly reading and returning their folders each week.
Today, in your child’s take home folder, they brought home a small slip of paper explaining our school literary magazine. This is an opportunity to create original work to be submitted to The MMA Review. The deadline for submissions is November 5th. If interested, students will be given class time to work on projects. Please feel free to talk with your child about some possible submissions pieces they would be interested in creating.
Also, we as a school are working hard to be mindful of our paper usage. I did not send home reading logs this week. My hope is that the habits are being established and that the reading is taking place for 20 minutes each night. If you feel that having an actual log helps your child be accountable for their reading, please let me know and I will place one in their folder, otherwise, I will not be sending them. Starting next week, we will be sending home a brief reading assignment to complete in relationship to their reading.
Home projects will start in October. Our first topic will be Zoology. Level 1: vertebrates, Level 2: the human body, and Level 3: invertebrates. I will first explain the criteria to the students tomorrow and then I will send out a blog post explaining the criteria and the topics through the end of the school year. So please be on the lookout.
Also, there was no flier sent out, but MMA cafe is starting tomorrow. Students may purchase items from the cafe for lunch. The menu will initially start small and will grow over the coming weeks. The following are items are available at this time:
Chocolate Milk ($1.00) Capri Sun ($.75) Microwave Mac n Cheese ($1.50) Pancakes (chocolate chip or blueberry 3 for $.75) Fruit Snacks (.$50) and Fruit/Nut bites ($.25 cents)
My understanding is that Jr. high will run the cafe on Tuesdays and 6th grade will run the cafe on Thursdays. The cafe is a fundraiser for their travel field trips in the spring.
As always, please feel free to share celebrations, concerns, or questions via email at bherrera@mariamontessoriacademy.org
Oh! Just a small side note, Ms. Susan will be out until Thursday due to training.
Home Projects
Thanks for all the hard work and support for our February home projects. They were fantastic! Our March home project is posted on the home project page of our blog. I will be explaining this new project on Monday to the class.
Take Home folders
Today, we sent home a red permission slip for our field trip to the dinosaur park on March 12th. Please read it over and send it back to school. We also sent home a purple paper stapled to your child’s work charts. Please, look these over, sign, and return that you have reviewed these with your child. We have seen some great things happening, but this past week several student have really lost their momentum. We thought creating some accountability may help get things back on track and focused during the Spring months. We also have a new reading log. The students will break down their reading according to fiction and non-fiction and write a brief writing sample relating to what they have read. These will be due back, in their folders, for next Monday. At this time, I will not assign specific IXL math lessons (several don’t follow the recommendation lessons, anyhow), but I do wish for students to still work daily on IXL. We are getting into the year where several students are at different progression and I don’t want to hold others back or create for others to fall behind. I find most of the students are just choosing what they want to work on anyway and are not following the outline. This is fine, just remember, if they are struggling and don’t understand after some brief guidance, IXL will show them as well, please have them close out the lesson and move onto another concept. We want this to be enjoyable and helpful. Also, don’t forget home projects are due this Friday. This project is the State home project. I feel that having a balanced life is important. Aside from reading, if students are working little by little on their home projects and not procrastinating until the end, a good time gauge is about 10 minutes a night of homework per grade level. This would equate to 10 minutes for first grade, 20 minutes for second grade, and 30 minutes for third grade. We should be modeling that reading is an enjoyable recreational activity and I would not necessarily count this time as homework. If your child is a struggling beginning reader, this time may need to be counted as homework. You make the judgement which best fits your child. Just to put things into perspective, in our classroom alone, we have students who are just barely combining letter sounds all the way to reading on Jr. High level. It makes it difficult to give everyone the same assignment when everyone is at different places in their personal growth. Thanks for your support and we look forward to seeing the student’s creativity with their State projects this week.