The Math Team wanted to communicate some general information to all of the families since we finished our first month of hybrid learning! We have worked out the kinks and set up expectations/routines with students, so here is a brief synopsis of each of the major digital resources we will be using this year:
Google Classroom: Google Classroom is the go-to for information about the class, assignments, and daily announcements. Students should be checking this daily. On Google Classroom, if an assignment is marked as “Missing,” it means that the student either never submitted the assignment or it was returned with feedback from the teacher to make revisions. It is very important that students are checking for missing assignments every day and reading our comments. Please make sure that you have accepted the Guardian Invite from the STEM Staff so you can set up your weekly or daily progress list for your student.
Aleks: Your student has (or will soon have) an ALEKS Personalized Pacing Guide released in Google Classroom catered specifically to them for the year. This is a pacing chart that will show goals for ALEKS completion at the end of each month. The goals are based on the Initial Knowledge Check your student completed at the beginning of the year. Your student has access to this, so please ask them to show you a few times each month to see if they are keeping pace to finish their pie by the end of the year.
Daily Supplies in class:
- Notebook: We are encouraging all students to bring a notebook to class. We use this notebook to take notes while learning a lesson, to show our thinking while work on Aleks, or, just for scratch paper to do math problems. This is especially useful if they need to watch a video on their iPad and want to take notes at the same time.
- Since we don’t have community supplies, it would be very helpful if the students brought a whiteboard marker (Expo Marker), a pencil, a ruler, and a calculator to class. You can keep these items in a plastic bag, or if you’re able, a pencil pouch/container.
- We remind the students to bring everything they need to class because they are unable to go to their lockers between every class period, and we are minimizing the number of students in the halls between and during classes. If a student forgets their supplies, unfortunately we cannot let them go to their locker, and we cannot lend them supplies for the time being.
At home/virtual expectations: We as a math team schedule virtual meetings with all of our classes (6-8) every Monday; the schedule is always available on the school website stemsaratoga.com. Core 1 classes meet virtually at 7:25 am; Core 2 classes meet at 9:20 am; and Core 4 classes meet at 1:30 pm. All students are expected to be in attendance at those times; meetings are recorded in case emergencies come up, so students can view what they missed. These recordings are available in the WebEx chat space for their particular math core.
For virtual days Tuesday-Friday, sixth grade classes still have scheduled meetings each day; meetings are at the same times the students would have class those days (same times as Mondays, except for Core 4 on Thursdays/Fridays being at 12:15 pm). Grade 7 and Algebra 1 also have scheduled meetings Tuesdays-Fridays at same times as listed above.
All math classes (6-8) have shared Daily Slides with all students, and on the slides every day are listed both tasks for the face to face Cohort, as well as the virtual Cohort too.