*Photos of the Week and Assembly Live Streams can be found in the Parent Update.
**All ES Faculty meeting this week. Please refer to the Schedule and Agenda (in the sidebar).
Thank you for feeding our students' young minds, making their little hearts feel full and creating a hunger for learning. We look forward to showing our appreciation this Friday April 29, 2015 at the Zavits' Home (Cseresznye Utca 17, Nagykovacsi 2094). The festivities will begin at 4:30 PM.
Please join me in thanking Sargent Busses who have graciously offered to provide bussing services free of charge for this event. For those of you wishing to enjoy a drink or two, buses will leave for the Zavits residence (from school) at 4:15 pm and 4:30 pm.
They will also take people back to the school or Hüvösvölgy at 7:30, 8:00, and 8:30 pm.
For those who are driving or walking, see the map below.
I am excited to announce that Bernadette Saunders will be joining our elementary team beginning in August 2016. She will take on the role of Grade 3 teacher. Bernadette is from Victoria, Australia. She currently lives in Beijing, China. Bernadette has been teaching for 15 years. More information about Bernadette can be found in the New Teacher Biographies sent out by Gabi Pitz on April 22. We continue to search for grade 1 and office assistant maternity leaves for the 2016–2017 school year.
~ From the Literacy Coach
Please take a moment to refresh your memory on the logistics for F&P and Writing On-Demand assessments. If you have questions or need support, please speak to Leigh, Melissa, or Stacy.
Fountas and Pinnell Reading Inventory K-5
- Please complete and record all F&P assessments by Friday, June 3.
- Assistants will receive substitute pay for 6 periods in grades K-2, but there will not be an additional substitute.
- Assistants and/or substitutes will be provided for 6 periods in grades 3-5.
- Grades 3-5 please fill in one team blank schedule for testing times and give to Erika in the office a week before testing.
- ALL teachers need to fill in a leave form with the 6 hours (on one slip) to ensure that the assistant gets paid for the hours.
- Let your EAL teachers know when you will be testing so the EAL students are not overwhelmed with WIDA and classroom assessments.
- Record the F&P instructional level on the child's white folder and include assessment inside. This folder will be placed inside the child’s cumulative folder. Please also record this information on the 2015-2016 Reading Progress database
- Please administer on-demand assessments at the culmination of each writing unit (Narrative, Informational, Opinion/Persuasive). All summative assessments should be complete by Friday, June 3.
- Record each summative on-demand writing score on the 2015-2016 Writing Progress database.
Think about our planet for a second. Earth has an elliptical — oval-shaped —orbit. That means we're closer to the sun for one part of the year and farther away another part of the year.
Does that fact explain why it's hotter in the summer and colder in the winter?
Lots of kids think it does. Lots of adults think so too. And they're wrong.*
Philip Sadler is both a professor of astronomy and the director of the Science Education department at Harvard University, and he's obsessed with wrong answers like these.
"Students are not empty vessels," he says. "Students are full of all kinds of knowledge, and they have explanations for everything." From birth, human beings are working hard to figure out the world around us.
But we go about it more like the early Greek philosophers than modern scientists: reasoning from our limited experience. And like those early philosophers — Ptolemy comes to mind — we're often dead wrong.
Sadler says that cognitive science tells us that if you don't understand the flaws in students' reasoning, you're not going to be able to dislodge their misconceptions and replace them with the correct concepts.
"It's very expensive in terms of mental effort to change the ideas that you come up with yourself," Sadler says. "It's a big investment to say, 'I'm going to abandon this thing that I came up with that makes sense to me and believe what the book or the teacher says instead.' "
In one study, which he recently wrote about in American Educator magazine, Sadler gave 20 multiple-choice science questions to a group of middle school students. For each test item, one of the "distractors" was a very common misconception. In fact, often the misconception was far more popular than the right answer.
For example:
2. Eric is watching a burning candle very carefully. After all of the candle has burned, he wonders what happened to the wax. He has a number of ideas; which one do you agree with most?
a. The candle wax has turned into invisible gases.
d. All of the wax has melted and dripped to the bottom of the candle holder.
The wrong answer, d., was chosen by 59 percent of the students; only 17 percent chose the right answer, a.
The study also gave the same test to these students' teachers. They asked them which of the wrong answers was most commonly chosen. They found that teacher knowledge of common student misconceptions was weak: They knew 85 percent of the right answers, but only 41 percent of the "right" wrong answers.
Want to read on? Click here to access the full article. Thank you, Kim Porter, for sharing.
The average school year in America lasts just over 1,000 hours, or 42 continuous days--longer than in most other developed countries. And yet when it comes to performance in math the National Report Card from 2013 shows that only 26% of 12th graders are proficient in math. How can it be that we are putting in so much time, and yet getting such poor results? Jo Boaler is a Professor of Mathematics Education at Stanford University and has written several books about revolutionizing the way math is taught. Her most recent book is "Mathematical Mindsets," and she recently founded a math resources website: youcubed.org.
Click here to listen to her interview on Inflection Point with Lauren Shiller