Successful kids and successful schools usually share a secret ingredient: supportive parents!

Here are 5 ways you can be involved in your child’s education. Some support your child directly and others benefit the whole school, including your child. Remember, you don’t have to do everything! Choose the activities that fit your interests and schedule.

1. Make sure your children go to school ready to learn. In the morning scramble to get out the door on time, your children may skip breakfast or leave homework behind. The day gets off to a much better start if they pack their backpacks the night before, get plenty of rest and have a good breakfast.

2. Make time for homework. Set up a study area with good lighting and a dictionary, and limit television on weeknights to be certain homework gets done. Make reading an everyday habit. Children who have “no homework” can always review the day’s lessons or read a book for fun.

You may also need to curtail extracurricular activities. Children who take part in other nonacademic activities for 20 or more hours per week usually don’t have enough energy to perform optimally in school.

3. Monitor your children’s academic progress. Don’t wait until report cards come out to check up on how your children are doing. Attend scheduled parent-teacher conferences to get acquainted with their teachers, and don’t hesitate to contact teachers at other times to find out whether your children are keeping up with assignments.

4. When there’s a problem, work with the school on your child’s behalf. If your child starts to slip academically, make an appointment with the teacher to put together a plan for correcting the problem. Teachers appreciate parents who reinforce the importance of schoolwork, and your child will have a better chance of succeeding if you and the teacher agree on a strategy.

If your child has difficulties with a teacher, try to keep an open mind and find out all the facts before jumping to conclusions. It’s always best to try to work out differences with teachers before going over their heads and complaining to the principal.

5. Attend school functions. Going to back-to-school night, the spring concert, school plays, talent shows and other school events shows your children that you value their schools. In a 10-year study of 20,000 teenagers, Laurence Steinberg found that only one-fifth of parents regularly attended school functions, and that those who did were much more likely to have high-achieving students.

Over the next few weeks, intermediate students will be given opportunities to build endurance and become accustomed to more lengthy assessments through the administration of benchmark tests.  These are not six weeks benchmark tests, but more closely resemble the length and rigor of state testing. We will only take one benchmark in each subject area.  We will begin with 4th grade Writing and 5th Grade Math and Reading on February 22nd and 23rd.  Math and Reading benchmarks will be given to 3rd and 4th grades on March 6th and 7th. Science will be taken by 5th grade on March 8th.

Teachers will use the results of these benchmarks to help students build on strengths and target areas of weaknesses. We are confident that our students will be successful.

Mrs. Emily Richeson, teacher at White Oak, recently shared a pdf of Marzano Question Stems. They were excellent and definitely worth passing on to other educators. For a printable copy, either click on the box or HERE.

Our methods of questioning will have a direct result on the level of learning that takes place in the classroom.

How Do I Receive an email from Skyward when Grades post?

If you would like to keep track of your child’s grades by email, Skyward can help. All that it is required of you is to go into your Family Access and adjust the email settings. Once you have entered the Skyward site, click on “email notifications” on the left. You can then choose to receive a daily or weekly email notification. Just another perk of Skyward!

The first six weeks reporting period has come to a close and the report cards will come home tomorrow, Thursday, October 6th.  NO progress reports were sent home the first six weeks as two weeks were spent teaching procedures and routines. We continue to stress high academic expectations. Small group instruction continues in each classroom and targeted areas of strengths and weaknesses will remain the focus of the excellent teachers here at White Oak elementary, providing both enrichment and intervention where needed.

As all K-12 teachers work diligently to prepare students for success as measured by our state’s expectations, the Texas Education Agency periodically releases information pertaining to the new State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. Parents and teachers alike need to stay informed of these releases as they are often times posted only for a brief time and then shortly removed. The following is a direct excerpt from one of these releases:

“As part of the effort to provide a clearly articulated assessment program that focuses on fewer skills and addresses those skills in a deeper manner, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is changing the way process skills are assessed on all social studies tests, all science tests, and grades 3-8 mathematics tests. For the STAAR program, process skills in social studies, science, and mathematics will be assessed in context, not in isolation, which will allow for a more integrated and authentic assessment of these content areas.  process skills will be incorporated into test questions and reported along with content skills under the content reporting categories.  Process skills will not be listed under a separate reporting category as was done previously with the TAKS program.  TEA will report both content and process student expectations for test questions that address a content skill and incorporate a process skill. Tests will have a minimum percent of questions that include both content and process skills.

RELEASED GRADE 3 SAMPLE QUESTION:

Melissa had some money in her purse when she went to the mall with her mother. She spent $5 on a book. Then her mother gave her $10. After Melissa spent $2 on a snack, she had $23 in her purse. How much money did Melissa have in her purse when she first went to the mall? Mark your answer.

A $26   B $17   C $20   D  $6

This test question addresses:

CONTENT: TEK 3.3B Select addition or subtraction and use the operation to solve problems involving whole numbers through 999

PROCESS: TEK 3.14C Select or develop an appropriate problem-solving plan or strategy, including drawing a picture, looking for a pattern, systematic guessing and checking, acting it out, making a table, working a simpler problem, or working backwards to solve a problem.

RELEASED GRADE 5 SAMPLE QUESTION:

There are 319 students who volunteered to work at a craft fair. An equal number of volunteers came from each of 4 grade levels. About how many volunteers came from each grade level?

A  100     B 80   C  325   D 40

This test question addresses:

CONTENT: 5.4A Use strategies, including rounding and compatible numbers to estimate solutions to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems

PROCESS: 5.1B Solve problems that incorporate understanding the problem, making a plan, carrying out the plan, and evaluating the solution for reasonableness”

(*No Grade 4 examples had been released at this time.)

As additional sample questions are released and information is provided to Texas schools, we will make every attempt to Keep Our Parents Informed of the direction that all Texas students must take to meet the TEKS and state expectations. We hope that this will give you a small idea of what your teachers and children must accomplish and why some of the work and methodologies should look different this year.

It just can’t be true! The first six weeks is already coming to a close on Friday, and students will receive report cards the following Thursday, October 6th.

REMINDER TO TEACHERS: Automatic posting begins Friday and will End on Monday.

Third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers will be giving six weeks tests during the week of September 26th – 30th. Parents should watch your child’s planner for more detailed information regarding subjects and days of tests.  Let’s work together to be sure that our children are ready.