5th Grade Keyboarding

Dance Mat Typing

Surfing the Net ~ Learning the basics

Footprints in the Sand

Sheppard Software

www.sheppardsoftware.com/math.htm

The MAPs are coming, the MAPs are coming!!

Next week, all students in grades 1 - 8 will be participating in the NWEA Mapping Academic Progress (MAPs) testing. This will be the first year that St Francis Xavier students are taking these standardized-based tests. Test Taker, NWEA's web based test-taking application, allows us to test our students on Minnesota standards for each grade level, compile the data, review the data, and better serve our students.

Grades 6 - 8 will take 3, 1 hour tests on math, reading, and science. Grades 2 - 5 will take 2, 1 hour tests on math and reading. After the results are sent to the company, they compile the data and send it back to us. We print the results and send them home to you. Interpreting new data is sometimes difficult and scary, we as a staff want to make understanding the results easy for you. No time is set yet, but we would like to be able to teach you how to read your child's scores and understand what they mean.

Testing takes A LOT of concentration and energy. Please make sure that your child gets a good nights rest, a filling and brain-happy breakfast, and send a healthy snack to school ; almonds, trail-mix, or fruit to keep their brain full of energy. They will most likely miss some time with their other specialist teachers, therefore their classroom teacher will make sure that they are able to move their bodies during the day, another way to keep their brain happy.

Thank you for your partnership in your child's learning journey.

Quarter 1 is wrapping up

Our first quarter of the 2009-2010 school year is coming to a close and so we are wrapping up projects and activities in the lab. During conferences, I will be located in the gym if you wish to talk with me. I will also have given each of your child's teachers work samples from the last few months.

Here is what we are working on now:

Grade 2 : I found a great new link to a web site from a Belle Plain school with an abundance of activities/games that focus on Reading Comprehension and Math skills. We will be using this site to help us get ready for the MAPS tests that we are taking soon. The website is :

www.belleplaine.k12.mn.us

Grade 3: I am increasingly impressed with this grade level's ability to locate a website and retrieve information from it without help. That is AWESOME! We are doing some collaboration with the social studies curriculum and technology by researching Native American tribes during computer class, recording the information, and taking it back to the classroom to use for their group projects.

Grade 4: The fourth graders are becoming more and more familiar with the Pages Word Processing program. They are currently working on a paragraph (keyboarding the text themselves) by underlining and changing the color of words which they will change by using the Thesaurus on www.webstersdictionary.com .

Grade 5: Fifth grade has been hard at work since the beginning of the year learning vocabulary words, parts of the computer and what they do, checking out the inside of a computer and more. All of that knowledge will culminate with a Quarter 1 test, which we are reviewing for now. They will be bringing their vocabulary words home this weekend to help them study for their test on Monday, November 9th.

Middle School: Our focus in the Middle School this quarter has generally being Cyber Smart and decoding/dissecting web sites to check if they are credible sources of information. Next quarter we will be working on a Spanish/Technology Project "Mi Familia". Each student will need to bring various pictures of themselves(involved in their favorite hobby, with their pet(s) during a vacation, etc), their entire family, their siblings, and their pet(s). Students may bring the flash drive home from school load pictures onto it and transfer them to their computer at school or if you have pictures on a disk, that would work as well. Hard copies of pictures can be brought to Target, scanned, and burned onto a disk. Please call me with questions, I would be happy to discuss it with you.

Have a wonderful rest of the week!!