Naaktgeboren's Class Blog

Greetings Families, I hope you are doing well. I wanted to let you know that the fourth grade team had decided to end weekly updates on the blog and will instead communicate important information through Google Classroom. Currently, all 4B students have accessed Google Classroom, so families should be able to keep up with important information there. I may still use the blog from time to time, so don't unsubscribe yet, but it won't be for the weekly updates. To see the updates in Google Classroom, this will be the first thing that comes up and is called the steam. If your child is in the classwork section of the Google Classroom and you want to see the steam, click on "Stream" at the top of the page. In addition to seeing the weekly update, please go to Google Classroom regularly to review your child's graded and returned work. I recommend that you do this at least once a week, but I am doing my best to grade throughout the week. You can do this by following...

Greetings Families, I hope you are doing well and that you had an enjoyable weekend. Tomorrow is the start of Week 5. Here are some things to keep on your radar for this upcoming week. Uploading Work Going forward, all student work should be uploaded into each assignment. Therefore, once a student completes an assignment, the work for that assignment should be scanned and uploaded into Google Classroom for that assignment. This is preferable because it makes it easier for Ms. Johnson and I to grade the student's work, and it allows for us to give better feedback on how students are doing. If students are completing their work is a Google Form, once they are finished, they should submit the Google Form and mark the assignment as done. There is nothing for them to submit if they are submitting a Google Form. 4-Point Rubric Mr. Gillingham should be releasing a communication about the 4-point rubric we will not be using. Just know that on the scale, a 2-4 is a passing gra...

Greetings Families, All of the work for weeks 1-3 has been graded. Ms. Johnson and I have been in dialogue with students who have still failed to turn in their packets from Week 1 and Week 2. Tonight, I emailed families whose child is missing a number of assignments from Week 3. If you didn't get an email, your child may be missing some assignments, but has completed the majority of them. If you would like to check, these are the steps you would take. Students may still submit late work. Google Classroom should let me know if your child submits something late. If you still see it on the list after a few days, please let me know. Additionally, if you are having any issues uploading materials or have other concerns, please let me know. I know that at-home learning is new for all of us. I've had my struggles with it as a teacher and as a parent.  Best, Michael Naaktgeboren

Greetings Families, I hope you are doing well. I've done my best to have everything uploaded into Google Classroom for the week. If you have any struggles, please don't hesitate to reach out to Ms. Johnson and me. It looks like most are getting things figured out, which is good news! I'm hoping to have all of week 1 and 2 materials back to you by Thursday. Many of you will see that week 1 packet has already been returned. As Great Hearts released in a prior statement, this quarter will be graded on a pass/fail and the primary concern is the completion of work and the effort given. For instance, on a writing assignment, a student may "complete" something, but if it is evident that he did not give an appropriate amount of effort, he will not receive full credit. At the same time, if a student is struggling with something and not always getting the right answer, it's the effort that we are most concerned with. Zoom Meetings Wednesday: We will be having o...

Greetings Families, I'm not sure if you noticed, but I changed the way I titled this post, I went back to the way I used to title them. My intention is to communicate that we are moving forward though things have changed. This week, we start something new--Google Classroom. When you head into your child(ren)'s Google Classrooms this week, you will notice that we have significantly reduced the work for this week. We did this because we expect the transition to an online platform to be difficult. Therefore, on Monday, students only have to do a Spalding and math lesson in fourth grade. This will helpfully create the time necessary for them to learn (and likely for you to learn) how to create PDFs of their work and how to upload the packets. I used Apple's Notes application on the iPhone to create PDFs of my children's work tonight. There was a page limit, so I had to create multiple files. Inside of Google Classroom, I've uploaded a video provided by Ms. Trahan us...