Dear Parents,
Thank you very much for a wonderful school year so far! Your children are bright, unique, and a pleasure to teach. Our students have been adapting well to the Common Core State Standards by now. The fifth grade team is very focused on providing your students with the most current curriculum and best practices for teaching the Common Core Standards and 21st Century Skills. Therefore now that your students have been in school long enough to ease back into the routine of homework, we are aligning our homework assignments to reflect more accurately the skills, strategies, and necessary outcomes desired to be successful with Common Core. This is the bi-monthly homework menu.
This project menugives your child the opportunity to have autonomy, choice, and take initiative with their project-based learning. I have gone over the Menu in detail and explained to the students the expectations. The students seem to be very excited with this new project, which reflects Common Core Standards Learning. There are 6 project options for this first Common Core Reading Menu with a variety of subjects, topics and interests for the students to choose from. This first project will be due in two weeks. Each month your child will have different ProjectMenu for the month. I am hoping for students to be able to do two projects a month. One every two weeks. However, depending on the length of the month, your child will have one or two projects due for the month.
Students will be responsible for researching, reading a book, article, or non-fiction text with each option. They are allowed to use appropriate articles from websitessuch as times News For Kids. Throughout these assignments the students will be using critical thinking skills, communication, collaboration, creativity, global awareness/citizenship and technology. The projects are designed to cover not just the Language Arts, but to further deepen students understanding of the Sciences, History, Social Studies, and Math related to their coursework. Students will be required to turn in the projects on time and to present their project to the class once a month. The presentation part of the project will help prepare them on their communication, public speaking and fluency. The Cultural For the month of October everyone will be presenting their project since they will only have one and it is our first one. The Hispanic Country/Cultural Research Paper is a separate assignment that is not due until the end of November. I will give plenty of scaffolding in class as well as teach how to organize and manage their time when they have more than one assignment to handle at one time. Multitasking, planning a schedule to accomplish multiple assignment, and organization is a key skill set that this system will help better prepare your students for middle school, high school as well as their future academic endeavors at a university or college. Communication is key so please do not hesitate to email me @ regarding homework if you have any questions, concerns or requests regarding your child.
To conclude please do check my teacher web page for copies of the projects and the Common Core Monthly Reading Menu.
Sincerely,
Cindi Marsh
Educator San Jose Unified School District