"Common Care Standards" Parent Guide

Edgemont Elementary School in Moreno Valley recently provided information on the "Common Care State Standards Grades K-5 Guide" for parents and family members of students, as well as school staff. Here is a brief explanation of this Guide, broken into grades: -Kindergarten Language Arts: The Guide ensures that students learn the basic features of letters and words, like the alphabet, and the sound that letters and words make. This will help the students learn new words and understand simple reading material. To further instill this knowledge, students will also draw, write and speak aloud the information to their classmates. Mathematics: Students will learn to work with shapes, while learning what numbers represent and simple addition and subtraction. They will exercise these skills with activities like counting objects in two different groups, comparing the numbers to see which is greater and solving word problems with numbers up to 10. Addition and subtraction will be taught with the use of fingers, mental images, drawings and sounds. -First Grade Language Arts: The Guide states that students will learn important skills including reading, writing, listening and speaking. After reading stories, they will think and talk about what they read and write about in articles, stories and more. While writing, they will learn how to construct clear sentences. Mathematics: Students will work with whole numbers and group those into tens and ones as they learn basic addition and subtraction. They will also use diagrams, charts and tables to solve various problems. These questions will also be word problems that include addition and subtraction of numbers up to 20 in order to get the answer. -Second Grade Language Arts: Students will continue to learn important skills but will expand their knowledge and retell stories to figure out the main lesson or point of that story. They will also identify the differences between characters within a story. Asking “who, what, where, when, why and how” will help them achieve this. While writing, students will introduce the topic, and will provide facts to develop different points they make. At the end of their story, they will learn to create a concluding point. Mathematics: Students will learn the same things, however, their word problems will include problems that will take up to 2 steps to solve while including numbers through 100. While more quickly learning addition/subtraction of numbers through 20, they will gradually transition to calculate numbers through 100. Students will also receive an introduction to simple fractions using geometry skills like shapes. -Third Grade Language Arts: Students will learn to determine the moral of a story, will explain how they got to that conclusion and will explain how it is developed in the story. While reading, students will have to develop answers to various questions by identifying the part of the text where they found the answer. Mathematics: Students will learn two-step word problems including addition and subtraction but also multiplication and division of numbers through 100. As they are introduced to multiplication and division, they will gradually become familiar with the concepts between these types of arithmetic. While applying their own ideas and problem-solving skills, they will solve for problems of numbers through 100. They will also start to understand the idea behind the area of different shapes. -Fourth Grade Language Arts: Students, while continuing their reading, writing, listening and speaking skills, will embark on more challenging literature to help expand their vocabulary. After reading, they will need to be able to explain in great detail what their reading entailed, while referring back to the text. In their writing, they will organize their ideas and strategies to develop topics that will include details, definitions, facts and reasoning. They will compare and contrast different points of view within a story, including the first- and third- person perspectives. The use of visual sources like charts and graphs will also come into play as they will pull and interpret information from them. Mathematics: Students will be taught the concept of multi-digit whole numbers: how to round, find the product of two, recognize that a digit in one place represents ten times what it represents in the place to its’ right, and learn the symbols: more than, less than, and equal to. Students will also learn the break down of fractions, which includes the importance of the same denominators and how to add and subtract whole numbers, multiply fractions by whole numbers, and understand why one fraction may be equal to another. -Fifth Grade Language Arts: Students will learn to determine the main parts in a story including the theme, details, and the way each character responds to the challenges they are faced with, which will allow them to summarize the text. They will draw from the information given in a text to locate the answer to a question. Students will group information into appropriate categories by using, for example, headers. They will use words that will help link or relate information across information like, especially, for example. Mathematics: Mathematics includes the understanding of place value by exercising this skill with decimals up to the hundredth place. Students will also expand their use of fractions by adding, subtracting and multiplying fractions. They will also learn the overall concept of a fraction as division of the numerator by the denominator. Geometry will also come into play as they learn measurement skills, and the overall concept of volume of a figure. The Guide encourages parents and guardians to connect with their child’s teacher to remain involved in the child’s learning experience. A few other suggestions for parents regarding Language Arts include: giving them space to read on their own, providing reading materials on different subjects they are interested in, and allowing their children to utilize available technology as a learning tool. The Guide emphasizes the importance of praising children when they solve a problem correctly, encouraging them not to give up.