Cerrito Creek

Homework:
Math: 4th graders begin their dream house project, 5th graders have a wide range of differentiated assignments, teachers tried to meet with everyone to make sure they have a "just right" assignment for tonight. If a student does not know, please do one page in the packet that feels challenging but attainable. We'll do more in future days and weeks to better elaborate this process of wide differentiation.

Science OR two pages of Wordly Wise for the other part of the homework. The science homework would be to write a page on the density experiment you carried out today. What did you learn? What did you control? What was your variable?


Is individualized homework a possibility? a few of my thoughts...
All homework should address the needs of the individual students in the class. When a student brings home a just right book and reads it for twenty or thirty minutes, is that individualized homework? When a student writes in her notebook for fifteen minutes and is thus practicing her craft at her current level, is that individualized homework? I think not – or at least, it's not the best we can do. 

Though we learn from books and can develop our thoughts in writing, to just practice them is not to maximize the learning experience (or make the best use of our precious time). In a perfect world, the process of assessment and feedback would be connected to the understanding goals so clearly that a student would know exactly what he or she had mastered and what would be the next step. She would know that she had mastered the skill of comparing fractions with unlike denominators and was progressing in her ability to convert fractions to decimals and percents. What's the homework? No need to ask, just head on over to the hanging file labeled "converting fractions to decimals and percents" and do a page for homework. She would keep a record of her homework endeavors, and track her own progress toward the unit goals. She would know to read that just right book, but to practice reading dialogue aloud with intonation, or to do that writing but to focus on commas or end punctuation.

That's what I'd like to accomplish, eventually; I endeavor to not only understand these students on a profound level but teach them to let their self-understanding inform the educational experience.