Considering we have a variety of needs, strengths, and weaknesses found in our room sending home a worksheet might meet the needs of a few, be too easy/not needed for others, and be too hard for the rest (and as a parent you may not understand how to help).  With this in mind, I am going to keep homework very light this year while encouraging you to personalize real-life learning opportunities at home. This could include helping in the kitchen to reinforce or introduce fractions or looking at a chapter book to understand how paragraphs are used. This is the most meaningful and rewarding way to learn.  

My main focus, as a class, is on reading nightly. This will help develop a healthy routine and is the number one way to increase our vocabulary knowledge. Here are the numbers that support reading and its impact on achievement and vocabulary acquisition:

Achievement Percentile    Minutes of Reading/Day   Words per Year

90th                                          40.4                                          2,357,000

50th                                          12.9                                          601,000

10th                                          1.6                                            51,000

Source: Adapted from Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988 (Allington, Richard)

Read more from my article with Scholastic titled Homework: Applying Research to Policy

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3750268

Developing talent areas: If your child is like my son, they have intense interests that occupy their time at night. We should encourage our children to develop these talent areas even further, even if you tire of hearing about these topics over and over again. Future writer? Let them write! Future vet? Let them search Internet sites, read, or talk to a local vet. This has great value! We want to nurture these talent areas even more. We are working with future leaders of the world. Imagine the parents of our greatest minds telling them as a child to stop talking about their passion area or to stop asking questions.

Working on areas of concern: I plan on having three options to help with developing areas of concern.

1. 1.I will be adding an academic podcast link shortly. This will be a no frills approach to me showing/ telling you what we have learned recently. Having troubles helping your child multiply multi-digit by multi-digit? Check out this link shortly for help.  Again, it’s a no frills approach, but it will get the job done on explaining what we are doing in class.
   

2. 2.Because we don’t use textbooks or worksheets very much, I am going to utilize our math and social studies notebooks as a resource center. Most material will have answers included so you can help your child practice correctly as well as apply it to additional problems like it that you create. It will include songs, practice with answers, and step-by-step how to directions given by me to students. It will be organized by units of study.
   

3. 3.Contact me and I will be happy to provide you with more specific resources in an area of need.
   

                Weekly Homework

Every day: Read

Often: Practice skills indicated for use on IXL. Please let me know if you didn’t receive an email from me with specific skills that should be practiced.

Monday- Spelling practice

Tuesday- Work on bug-a-licious math project and/or your goods for our class store on Friday

Wednesday- Continue with IXL practice

Thursday- Weekly reflection and R/LA probe will be printed out for practice at home.

Bunyi_Weekly_Reflection.pdf

                       Spelling Words:

Updated 2/8/10

Spelling

List 1

sorts across long vowels- day, gate, mail, trade, stay, eight, team, seat, free, field, street, she, fine, light, pie, wild, time, shy, rope, post, gold, coal, stone, throw, rule, fruit, blue, tube

Spelling

List 2

Dipthongs in Two Syllables- county, council, lousy, fountain, mountain, scoundrel, counter, around, bounty, foundry, mouthful, rowdy, flower, allow, brownie, vowel, shower, towel, tower, chowder, coward, drowsy, powder, prowler, power, double

Spelling

List 3

Long to short vowel alternation patterns in related words:

prescribe/prescription; sage/sagacity; profane/profanity; criticize/criticism; telescope/telescopic; microscope/microscopic; cone/conic; flame/flammable; arise/arisen