Dear Families of The Children’s School,

A new version of the Department of Education report card will be coming home on Wednesday, November 13, 2013. The indicators for elementary school have been updated to reflect the expectations of the Common Core and the benchmarks for College and Career Readiness. Your child’s grades will reflect if he/she is approaching, meeting or exceeding the benchmarks of the learning standards.

The ELA standards are based upon both narrative and nonfiction work in our reading and writing units and our math curriculum focuses on students becoming mathematical thinkers in solving problems.

You will notice that there isn’t an overall ELA grade on your child’s report card. Our thinking was that each component of ELA (reading, writing, speaking/listening) should be assessed independently. A child’s progress in reading depends on a number of factors. Staff will review the various skills that students develop, as readers, instead of focusing on only the reading level of each student. The focus of our conferences will be to discuss your child as a learner and how we can support them.

Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you at Parent/Teacher Conferences on Thursday, November 14, 2013.

Arthur P. Mattia
Principal