High Ability Update

We are taking a study trip to the Field Museum as a culminating activity! It's a great way to end our in depth study of Ancient Egypt. Join us in summer-school-fun where learning is an adventure!!!

This integrated summer school program provides students with a time traveling adventure complete with reading, writing, projects, presentations, and enrichment activities to dig deeper into essential skills. The program is developed and facilitated by Duneland's high ability staff. This year's focus: Ancient Egyptian Adventures.

• High Ability Summer School is available for students currently identified as high ability in grades 1-4.
• At least 15 students must be enrolled for the course to be held.
• June 6 - June 29, 2023 (15 days), with no school on Fridays.
• Location: Chesterton Middle School
• Format: In Person
• Student Day: 8:00 - 11:50 a.m.
• Limited transportation will be available.
• No meals provided, yet snacks are welcomed
• Study trip to the Field Museum
• Your returning guides: Mrs. Koedyker and Ms. Mysliwiec

On Monday, May 1st, the window for our last NWEA test of the school year opens. Remember this is another pathway into High Ability in addition to CogAT. As data comes in, the HA team and I will be inputting scores for the district K-4th. Our High Ability Cadre will use data from CogAT, NWEA, and teacher input for placement into HA for next year. The top 10% of the grade level are identified as high ability or having the potential to be high ability. The NWEA window closes the week of May 12th, so final decisions will be made the last week of school. It's a very busy time for the HA department.

Letters will be sent to all current kindergarten, first, second, and third grade students who qualify for High Ability next school year. The letter will denote if they qualify for Language Arts, Math or both. A permission slip in the form of a Google Form will be sent to your email. Letters to students in second grade who did not qualify in third grade will also be sent home. *Current first and third grade HA students will automatically be in the program next year.

If you have a fourth grader, you will be able to see class placement when their schedule comes out prior to next school year. High ability and advanced classes look different at the intermediate level. While we identify the top 10% for High Ability at all levels, additional students are placed in the classes beginning after elementary school. Honors classes are a good fit for many students who don't have the label of HA. Questions pertaining to their schedule next year can be directed to either WIS or LIS. Duneland's HA page is listed below. You'll find it goes into more detail.

NWEA is the achievement test which all students take three times a year. There's a great opportunity to support your child's learning based on their NWEA scores. In addition to supporting what's going on in the classroom, you can encourage students to go on Edmentum (AKA Exact Path). Many students are familiar with it already! It's a program they access through Clever. Edmentum gives your child what they need to work on based on their most recent NWEA scores. NWEA is a great measure for high ability identification because it will give students above grade level questions as they answer correctly. For our achievement measure we use the grade level percentile. If you have questions about Edmentum, your child's teacher will be able to help.

Our persuasive writing lesson continued. A couple students needed time to finish their final written copy. All of them compared their copy to the one projected on the board to assure proper spelling. They recorded themselves reading the paragraph aloud. Students screen mirrored their iPads to the classroom Apple TV to share their videos with the class. It was nice for them to share their presentation of the persuasive paragraph. They really enjoyed that! Look for their paragraphs to come home next week. We moved on to Rebus puzzles. We discussed connections to our persuasive paragraph and connections in regard to Rebus puzzles. More Rebus puzzles coming next week.

We took a moment so one of the students could finish the Think Deeply question from last week. After that, it was time for a check-up. The check-up was an assessment on their understanding of congruent shapes and symmetry. As I expected, the students did very well on it! We also managed to squeeze in some time for the students to create symmetrical shapes. I was impressed with the intricacy of some of the symmetrical designs. These kids have a good understanding of symmetry!

I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff kicked off our look at persuasion. Thankfully the boy in the book doesn't beg, whine, or cry to get what he wants. He pleads his case to his mother through letters. We watched several old commercials and discussed the purpose, the target audience, and what persuasive strategies the commercials use. We are working towards doing some persuasive writing. We used a Venn diagram to compare/contrast the two novels we read by Kate DiCamillo. We will be reflecting back on our two novel studies for our persuasive writing. I've asked the students to keep their eyes & ears open for examples of persuasion.

If your son or daughter suddenly starts calling money mula, you have me to thank or blame;) We have been working with a pretend money system containing only one, ten, and hundred mula bills. This is helping students understand place value as they solve a variety of contextual addition and subtraction problems in various types of situations including add to, take from, put together/take apart, and comparison situations. This mula math challenges students to interpret multi-step problems. Understanding what a problem is asking and how a problem needs to be set up is often harder than the computation required. Also, figure in a pretend money system. Tough stuff!

We had the second work day on the third move/project in Fairy Tale Tic Tac Toe (we didn't have class on Tuesday due to ILEARN). As you know, each student is completing three projects. Each project is to be completed in three class periods. We have had 8 of 9 work days. Next week, we will have our third work day on the third move/project before heading into a few class periods to wrap up loose ends. Some students have chosen to take some of the work home with them. I did not ask this of them, but it is a great idea! You may want to check in and see if your son or daughter wants to work on anything at home.

Time for a check-up! Students began taking an assessment on Egyptian math symbols. The hardest part of the check-up is the two questions that require the students to answer in words. As you know, writing in math is a skill we work on repeatedly in elementary HA. Although challenging, most of the students have become familiar and comfortable with what is expected of them. We have a couple students that tend to tune out of class when they think they understand something. When they reach a point where they think, "I've got this," they don't realize there is still much to learn. They may be able to do the math and not understand why things work as they do. Answering these questions is much harder for students in that scenario. Students will have more time to finish their check-ups next week. A few students are done and enjoying Sudoku with their extra time.

This group is especially interested in the summer school theme since it ties in nicely with what we have been doing lately. Please see above for details on HA summer school!

We are already a third of the way through the book. Time flies when there's a mystery to solve! Students updated their folders with paired heirs, clues, and character notes on Monday. The next day, we briefly touched on prepositions again. I think the students ask me about prepositions because they enjoy the songs. Whatever works, right?! After that little detour, we did some reading in our novel. There is homework this weekend. Please be sure your student reads chapters 11-13 by Monday. Thank you for your continued support!

We continued to work on decimals this week. It became apparent I needed to step back and slow down, so we worked through decimal addition and multiplication problems as a group. I briefly showed the students how to do 3-digit by 3-digit multiplication problems since it presented itself in our decimal work and a few of them did not know how to do that. Although this was review for a few of the students, it was good practice for them. During our second class period, students that are farther along in their decimal skills paired with students that needed assistance to work through some problems together. They seem to enjoy peer learning. We will be moving on from decimals, so the students took their decimal packets home. If you have your child do work in the summer, I suggest you keep the packet to revisit later.

Email: kapeterson@duneland.k12.in.us
Location: Jackson Elementary School, North 400 East, Valparaiso, IN, USA
Phone: 219-983-3680