Hello Families!
I hope this week of online learning has gone well for you and your child! I feel like in our house, we are finally starting to find some sort of rhythm and balance to our days. I know many of you are also working from home, or out of the house, and trying to manage your child's learning as well- this is no small task! I hope that each of you are finding balance and joy in these strange days.
Blog Use
The fourth grades leads have made a joint decision to discontinue the weekly bog updates. Instead, going forward we will be utilizing the Stream feature in the Google Classroom home screen.
Each week you can find the weekly goals by subject and the daily overview in the "Week __" topic posted each Friday afternoon. I will also send out emails when needed.
Zoom Security
We will continue meeting twice a week for the remainder of the quarter. Our Monday meeting is focused community building, and our Thursday meeting is for math tutoring.
I would like to let you know the security measures I have put in place to prevent unwanted visitors in our meetings. First, the Zoom links are not posted anywhere public, like this blog. The links will only be posted in our Google Classroom stream or sent out by email.
Second, each meeting is password protected. Even if someone was able to hack into the meeting ID, they could not gain access without the password. It's worth noting that if you click on the direct link I send out, you will not need to enter the password. I have also enabled the waiting room so that I have to approve each meeting participant. Going forward, please be sure that your child's participant name is their first and last name. You can rename by opening the participant panel and right-clicking on your name. I will not admit any users with unfamiliar names, or names like i-Pad. Thank you for helping to keep our meetings safe!
I have also disabled screen-share, chat, and recording for our meetings. To protect everyone's privacy, please do not allow your child to record any of the meetings using another device.
Pass/Fail Grading
By now, everyone should have seen the 4-point grading rubric sent out by Mr. Gillingham. We will be using these guidelines to assess student work.
There seems to be a lot of questions and confusion about the pass/fail grading for this quarter. I'd like to try to clarify this if I can.
Your child will not earn a grade for this quarter, I will simply assign the a "pass" or a "fail" at the end of the quarter. It IS possible for your child to fail the 4th quarter, if they score lower than 50% overall. However, this does not mean that they will fail the grade. No student will be eligible for retention based on their quarter 4 grades.
It is important that your child complete the work with their best efforts to make sure they are prepared for 5th grade. If your child has not completed much work since spring break, when we return to school in the fall, they will struggle in 5th grade. The work we are giving is to prepare your child, the best we can under these conditions, so that they will excel next year.
You can see your child's grades in you go into to Classwork - View Your Work.
You can filter by Assigned, Returned With Grade, Missing.
Please let me know if you have any questions!
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