1. How can I help my child at home be more successful for school?
Core and Curriculum
How can I help my child at home be more successful for school?

2. Want to Stop Fighting Homework Battles?
1)-Set a consistent time and place to work Monday- Thursday
2)-Don’t compete with “favorites”
3)-Get your child off to a solid start by spending the first minutes with him/her and then back away and let them work by themselves
4)-Even if your child comes home and says, “I don’t have any homework tonight…” maintain the set time and place Monday-Thursday (write/type a letter to grandma, read a book/magazine, study spelling, work a puzzle, play an educational game)
5)- Follow up with reading to or with your child and questions

3. What Research Says about Helping Our Children at Home:
In a class of 20 students, few if any teachers can find even 5 minutes of time in a day to devote to reading individually with each student.
You are your child’s first teacher
Out-of-school reading habits of students has shown that even 15 minutes a day of independent reading can expose students to more than a million words of text in a year.
Size of vocabulary predicts successful reading ability-an average 6 year old should know 5,000 words , an average 14 year old should know 25,000 words, and an average adult should know 60,000 words.
Today, a 6 year old on average knows 1,000 words, a 14 year old on average knows 10,000 words and an adult on average knows 25,000 words.

4. What Kinds of Books Should We Be Reading at Home?
Elementary-50/50
50% Non-Fiction (stories about real people, fact books, trees, automobiles, insects, cooking)
50% Fiction (make-believe, fairy-tales, adventure, magic, not true)
Suggestion- alternate every other night or every other book if reading chapter books
Middle- 60/40
60% Non-Fiction
40% Fiction
High School- 70/30
70% Non-Fiction
30% Fiction

5. What Kinds of Reading Questions Should We Ask Our Kids?
Let’s look at the handouts.
We want our kids to think beyond the surface and begin to form ideas about what they are reading based on what the story or information is telling them.
Have your child point to specific sentences in the book that “prove” their responses or ideas.

6. How Should I Read?
Read to your child by modeling with books that are a little above his/her ability to ready by himself/herself
Read with your child (take turns reading pages or paragraphs)
Let your child read by himself/herself if it is a book he/she can read without help and still understand it
Use your question handouts and make your child put his/her finger on sentences that answer the questions or give clues about where the answers come from

7. At the End of the Year… “Benchmarks”
Grade
Book Levels
Words Per Minute (wpm) K D -
1st
J-K 47
2nd
M-N 90
3rd
P-Q
100
4th
S-T
115
5th U
130
6th Z
120
Let’s pause here and take a look at what these “levels” look like in a real book that is used to check your child’s ability…

8. Math Help at Home Emphasis now is WHY and not just HOW
Multiple ways to solve problems
Problem solving with real-world math
Pay bills
Estimate the cost of the groceries in your cart
Determine how much food to buy or make for a party
Double a recipe or cut a recipe in half
Figure the cost of lunch at a restaurant
Calculate the cost of school lunch for the week or month
Determine how long your child will need to save his allowance in order to buy a particular item
Determine the number of miles driven in X hours
Figure the cost of X number of minutes of cell phone use if you pay X cents/minutes
Determine how many gallons of gas you can buy with X dollars
Determine how many chocolate chips are needed if X number of cookies each has 3 chocolate chips

9. How Does the Classroom Look Today. What Can I Connect to
How Does the Classroom Look Today? What Can I Connect to? What Do I Need to Understand Has Changed?
Enjoy some videos of our students and teachers interacting in today’s 21st Century Classroom.
How does it look different or the same from the classroom you attended as a student in school?
Record your thoughts as you watch and then let’s talk about it.
Seeing what is the same or different will help us help our child at home!