Greetings Families,
If you've seen the post about the upcoming lessons for the week, you likely noticed that the majority of our efforts are on preparing for AzMERIT and AIMS Science. I wanted to take a bit of time to explain our reasoning behind this.
As a classical liberal arts school, we establish well-rounded, Socratic learning as one of our goals. We also believe that learning is to be robust, deeper than wide, and something that inspires a love for that which is good, true, and beautiful. This year, I believe we have done that well. In science, students have had the opportunity to explore the wonders of chemistry, electricity, and geology. In history, they learned about epic wars and the struggles between civilizations. In grammar, they learned how words work together and in Spalding they have comes to understand why words are spelled the way they are. Furthermore, in literature, they have traveled to different worlds with the characters they read about and in math, they now know about decimals and the order of operations.
Why then has the fourth-grade team decided to test prep? The reason for this move is to allow students to reinforce their learning, to better gauge where students are in their learning, and to prepare students for the different format standardized tests present. Today, in math, students were challenged to read problems and come to understand how to write those sentences out as number sentences and solve. What made this more challenging is the sort of confusing and unusually way in which these questions are written. I'm not sure why test writers write as they do, but it is very different from the way our Singapore text is written. However, this has its benefits. First, the strange writing forces students to slow down and think through it a little more than they would otherwise do so. This enhances the learning process and helps students see and correct improper learning. Furthermore, as we go through these as a class and I call on students to answer the questions, I can gauge the student's understanding of the content. And, because they have had to struggle through the problem, they are now more equipped to do well on standardized tests, which will follow them throughout their academic pursuits.
The students seemed largely fine with our work today, many happy to demonstrate their learning. However, I know what I've said thus far might sound like busy work to you and may start to feel like busy work to them. Please know that this is not meant to be busy work. Busy work is work simply meant to fill the time until something of importance comes along. This is meant to be meaningful and strategic practice that will equip them to do better on an end of year assessment and, more than that, to prepare them for future academic tasks.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.
Best,
Michael Naaktgeboren
If you've seen the post about the upcoming lessons for the week, you likely noticed that the majority of our efforts are on preparing for AzMERIT and AIMS Science. I wanted to take a bit of time to explain our reasoning behind this.
As a classical liberal arts school, we establish well-rounded, Socratic learning as one of our goals. We also believe that learning is to be robust, deeper than wide, and something that inspires a love for that which is good, true, and beautiful. This year, I believe we have done that well. In science, students have had the opportunity to explore the wonders of chemistry, electricity, and geology. In history, they learned about epic wars and the struggles between civilizations. In grammar, they learned how words work together and in Spalding they have comes to understand why words are spelled the way they are. Furthermore, in literature, they have traveled to different worlds with the characters they read about and in math, they now know about decimals and the order of operations.
Why then has the fourth-grade team decided to test prep? The reason for this move is to allow students to reinforce their learning, to better gauge where students are in their learning, and to prepare students for the different format standardized tests present. Today, in math, students were challenged to read problems and come to understand how to write those sentences out as number sentences and solve. What made this more challenging is the sort of confusing and unusually way in which these questions are written. I'm not sure why test writers write as they do, but it is very different from the way our Singapore text is written. However, this has its benefits. First, the strange writing forces students to slow down and think through it a little more than they would otherwise do so. This enhances the learning process and helps students see and correct improper learning. Furthermore, as we go through these as a class and I call on students to answer the questions, I can gauge the student's understanding of the content. And, because they have had to struggle through the problem, they are now more equipped to do well on standardized tests, which will follow them throughout their academic pursuits.
The students seemed largely fine with our work today, many happy to demonstrate their learning. However, I know what I've said thus far might sound like busy work to you and may start to feel like busy work to them. Please know that this is not meant to be busy work. Busy work is work simply meant to fill the time until something of importance comes along. This is meant to be meaningful and strategic practice that will equip them to do better on an end of year assessment and, more than that, to prepare them for future academic tasks.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.
Best,
Michael Naaktgeboren