October 7-11

   Another busy week is in the books.  We have been working hard here at Riverside.  We continued to read our City of Ember books and have some great discussions on these books.  We got into new groups for our work on our project.  The students worked on group contacts together.  This is something new that we want to incorporate into all of our projects.  We are hoping this helps the students take ownership of their projects and helps make each member of the group accountable for their part of the project. 
    Our math classes have been working on finding Mean, Median, Mode and Range of data sets.  We still are working on multiplying and dividing.  Please help us encourage your children to work on their facts.
    Just a friendly reminder that Riverside Reads is due on Friday.  This is the reading program that is replacing AR.  Student have been working all quarter on reading four books at their level.  Ask to see their chart if they are still working on it.  A lot of students have already turned this in for this first quarter.  Also, please remember to help us out by asking your child about Achieve 3000.  The expectation is two articles each week completing all five steps. 
   Parent/Teacher/Student conferences are a week away.  Look for reminder notes with specific times coming home early this week. 
   On Wednesday there was a meeting here at Riverside and it was a question and answer session based mostly on Echo.  Here is a quick recap from the meeting:  

We discussed logging on to Echo with your username and password, if this had not been done already.  If you still cannot log in please send an email to the homeroom teacher and we can send it on so that you can use Echo.  

We were shown how to get rid of all of the email's when anything is put into Echo.  If you would like to do this go to My settings under the cog at the top right of your Echo homepage.  Click on My settings and then choose Notification Settings.  From there you can uncheck anything you do not want to be notified of.  You can check at your leisure without all of the emails. 

We looked at the grade book and discussed the 5 learning outcomes that your child is graded upon: Agency, (Responsibility) Collaboration, Oral Communication, Written Communication, and Knowledge and Thinking.

Some parents shared concerns that they were unable to see what aspects their child needed help with, when they were “struggling.” The Knowledge and Thinking portion of the grade book is more or less the portion that deals with mastery of common core standards.

If students have zeros in Agency, it means that they are not turning things in on time, or at all. The other 3 outcomes are pretty self-explanatory. Anything that is a task and is graded by one of the teachers, is sent back to the student. They should be bringing these home in either a binder or in their Monday folders.

We discussed “group contracts” and the procedures the learners take to create a contract within their groups. They make sure that everyone is accountable for “jobs” within the project and the group leader makes sure that these tasks are being followed. If they are not, learners can follow a procedure, set-up and agreed upon their group, to “fire” a member of the team, if necessary.

    If you have any questions please feel free to contact one of us about any of this and we will be glad to help you out to the best of our ability.

     Have a great week!