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.