Williams Crew Update 9/20/12

            Good Evening Parents!  I wanted to send out the crew update a little early in preparation of our upcoming fieldwork and let you know what else is going on.

Grouse Ridge:  The class is doing their final preparations for the Grouse Ridge Field Trip.  Please make sure your student is at the school with all of their gear at 7:30am on Monday morning.  We will be loading the cars and headed out by 8:30am.  I have attached a copy of the “Student Supply List” that I sent home earlier this week.  For the parents that are joining us for the trip, I am having a short meeting after school (2:30pm) tomorrow in the classroom to go over the agenda and answer any questions you have.  If you need to get in touch with your child while we are on fieldwork I will have my cell phone (541-968-9537).

Thinkwave (Online Grade book):  You will be receiving an email in the next couple days inviting you to sign-up for an account to have access to your student’s grades and attendance.  We can only send out one email address per student but you can certainly share your login and password with other family members that you would like to have access (spouse, step mom/dad, guardian).  I will be doing my best to input grades as soon as I can and I will be announcing them in our updates.  We are the first class at SELS to try out this new program so if you have any questions let me know and I will try to find an answer as soon as I can.

SELS Grading Scale:  All of the SELS classes use the following Grading Scale:

4 – Advanced

3 – Meets (at grade level standards)

2 – Emerging

1 – Beginning

I will try to post a specific rubric online for all major assignments online.

Math: The students have been working on creating graphs in our first math unit.  Thank you for keeping them up to date on homework.  Their commitment to practice is definitely showing in the classroom.  I have been grading the homework every day and I will be posting grades each week.

Book Club:  We just finished with a writing/speaking assignment in which the students created their “Perfect World”.  This assignment was inspired by the utopian novel “The Giver” they read over the summer.  We had quite an array of creativity with this assignment, and I was very impressed with the different societies.  The grades are now posted on Thinkwave.  If you would like to see any of your student’s work, we will be gathering them in their portfolios in class.

Upcoming:  After we return from Grouse ridge we will be starting the history portion of our “Cartographers and Commanders” expedition.  The students will be working with the same online textbook they used last year “History Alive”.  I will address this more next update.

If you have any questions or need to reach me, please call or email at your convenience.  I thank you for all of the work you put in at home with the students, and for the help we will be receiving on our first fieldwork trip.

Looking forward to enjoying the outdoors!

Zach Williams