The Learning Tools
The Learning Target Deck
Developed during the remote learning phase of COVID, Mr.M has worked with teachers and families to develop an easy to use deck of cards to allow families at home to assist in working for each grade level. This deck contains all of the Common Core standards for each grade level in Math, Language, Reading, and Writing written in “parent friendly” language.
Give it a try! No matter what your child will feel you behind them, and they will have the confidence to raise their hand when they see their teacher talking about this topic in class. Here is an example to show how they work:
By sorting the cards, you can directly monitor their progress through these grade-level skills. When your student masters a standard, you can move cards into the “mastery pile”, and if you note confusion, you can move them to the “confused” pile. ”The information you gather from this will be AMAZING for your child’s teacher, as it will greatly reduce the time it takes them to identify your child’s confusion and allow them to get right to work on targeting exactly what they need in class.
We have created a list of Anchor Targets, to prioritize what is most important for those on a time crunch. These standards have been carefully chosen as the ones that build a core foundation of skills that your students will need as they work toward high school.Draw first 20 cards and begin sorting. Then start to spiral one slot per week.
They may STRUGGLE on some but its ok.
PERSEVERE and Spiral back again.
No worries if you decide to pass it to the teacher and move to the next one .
They will MASTER a pile of cards over time.
Please make sure to find ways to CELEBRATE
The Notebooks
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The student should bookmark a certain section of their ELA notebook. Throughout the different Parent Partnership decks, some of the cards will ask you to dictate a word or sentence and have your student write the sentence down in their notebook.
If you have a Kinder or 1st grade student, most likely your flash card will have you dictating words and focused on correct sound/spelling. As your student gets older, the focus will become on using punctuations, capitalization, commas, and quotations. You can also try multisyllabic words with certain syllable spellings like -tion, -tious, -ive patterns.
As you move toward 4th and 5th grade, listening comprehension becomes its own skill to be assessed in the SBAC exam. Providing space for your student to practice listening with podcasts or other long form audio programs and taking notes to be able to summarize is very helpful.
The ELA notebook can be a college ruled "composition notebook" if your student is in 3rd grade an up. But for those with Kinder through 2nd graders, you should look for a "primary journal" with wider lines and third dotted line. It is important for these students to practice writing each letter correctly and these lines can help guide this process. For the younger students there are primary journals with blank space on each page for and ways for them to communicate understanding.
This ELA Notebook is the single most helpful thing you can do to support your student's teacher. Good readers and writers are formed through good habits and perserverence. There are no shortcuts, and teachers only have so much bandwidth and hours in the day to practice. While it would be best to have space for them to read and write everyday, don't get discouraged. One day a week is better than none.
The ELA notebook is best divided into four main sections. One for their writing drafts, one for grammar and listen and write, one for their journal and reflections on their reading, and one for vocabulary and spelling pattern lists
Writing section
Here is where you want to follow your TPP cards for your grade level to approach the 4 main genres. Fictional Narrative or Poems, Persuasive writing, Informational reports, and Real life narratives. Each genre has a need to prewrite on a separate page where your student can generate and organize their ideas, before drafting. Writing is very fluid between grade levels with a few benchmarks to note. While Kinders can work on short sentences, by 2nd grade you are looking for three paragraph essays, and by 5th you need 5 paragraphs with citations.
Listen and Write
This section has been discussed in more detail in its own video. Here your student willl need space to practice sound spelling rules and grammar in short bursts.
Journal
This section is a space for your student to write down reflections on their learning but also possibly on their emotional experiences too. Regular entries with the date can quickly become a powerful way for them to process their emotions. This space can also become where they summarize and analyze the chapter book you are reading with them at bedtime.
Word lists
This section, best at the end of the ELA notebook, is where we provide space for students to capture unknown words they run into in reading and word sorting based on meaning or spelling pattern. There will be several pink ELA cards in each grade level deck with guidance on what lists your student should be keeping.
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The math notebook is the place to capture all the work your student does to master their grade level learning targets. It is important to give your student a page with a proper title to capture each learning target in the front, and a place in the back for extra practice problems for the ones that give them more trouble. This will allow them to use their own work as reference and "spiraling back" to review previously taught standards. Remember, what they have mastered in September most likely will not be remembered in March.
After your student goes to sleep and you have extra time, it is quite interesting to look over their math notebook to gain insight in their confusions. The best teachers collect scratch paper and use "error analysis" to diagnose misunderstandings like a doctor. As you move toward the spring, this time will make your math time much more time efficient and productive. Your students teacher will be very impressed by you!!!
The beauty of using a graph paper notebook is its flexibility in supporting a wide range of math skills. The squares help your student line up place values and decimal points.
The lines also allow for more clear demonstrations for geometry and measurement. You can easily see area, perimeter and can explore the ideas of scale and ratio.
And of course graphing. From 2nd grade through Senior Year, your student will be looking at data and graphs. They will have to plot lines and look at slopes and intercepts. Eventually they will use their knowledge of graphs to gather their own data and find trends.
Let them have a few pages to decorate and by creative too. We guarentee these notebooks will have sentimental value well beyond their academic.
