Wednesday, November 12

There's an image for student-led conferences on the internet - what does that tell us...?

8L:

Tomorrow we begin our student-led conferences, and I wanted to let parents know ahead of time what they can expect to see and hear:

1. Your child will be leading the conference; this is not to say that I (or you) won't be giving my input.  What it does mean is that your child, now in grade 8, must take ownership for his or her learning, and this is a chance to articulate that understanding.

2. The focus of the progress report is on the learning skills: while there are "grades" indicating roughly how your child is performing in the subject areas ("with difficulty," "well," and "very well"), but the emphasis needs to be placed on how to improve the learning skills.  We focus on strengths, and we listen for next steps.

3.  I always start my meetings with parents and students by establishing goals for the meeting.  As such, it would be great if you could come prepared with your own goals (you don't have to share this with your child).  My goal is simple: I want every parent to leave the meeting with a newfound awareness of his or her child's self-knowledge and his or her plan for action.  This is the cherry on top, but I also want parents to be impressed with the level of dedication and professionalism their child brings to the meeting (they have been working hard preparing).  In the past, I have been accused of being an "optimistic, or a positive" person, and I'm pleased to say nothing has changed.  As a team, (parent, teacher, student), anything can be accomplished.

4.   I will have the meeting times posted on the wall, and I would ask that you come in 1-2 minutes before your meeting is to begin so we can start on time; each interview is 10 minutes in length, so we have to be efficient with our time.  If you feel like there was more that needed to be discussed, I am always happy to schedule a follow-up meeting or we can continue the conversation on the phone (or via email).

Math

Speaking of learning skills, we had our second challenging patterning lesson today, and I was pleased to see that even more students had done prior research so as to familiarize themselves with the content.  If you want to see if your child learned the lesson or not, ask them the following: "How would you derive the algebraic expression for the following series: 4, 10, 20, 34...Better yet, show me."

Math test on patterning will be next week.  Because of the complexity of the material, the test will be divided over two days.

English

Tomorrow is our context and commentary test.  Some students took the initiative to bring in extra sample work so I could give them feedback.  Well done!

7F

Math

We are fixing to have our patterning test next Tuesday.  Ask your child: "Can you derive an algebraic expression from a series of numbers?  Can you replace a variable with the term number to come up with a value?  Can you graph an algebraic expression?  Given an algebraic expression, can you determine the nth term?  Show me!"

Tonight's homework is 10.3 (380) questions 1, 2, 4, 5acf, 6, 7, 9bcf, and 11.  Pay particular attention to questions 6 and 11...

English

We have finished our learning skills video productions and I'm in the final editing phase.  I'm hoping that we can watch them tomorrow, but no promises.