SAR stands for Short Answer Response.  It is a form of open-ended activity in which students must write a thorough response in a limited amount of space.  This limit helps students to focus their responses in order to avoid a LONG response in which they “through everything but the kitchen sink” into a response in hopes of including valuable detail.  In third grade, students learned about the importance of including detail and supportive evidence.  Now, in fourth grade, we are focusing on being selective when choosing what pieces of supportive detail will best support the response.

You will see two drafts coming home today.  The first (written on the worksheet) is ungraded.  We reviewed several anonymous SARs and discussed the characteristics of a quality SAR.  Then, students revised their SARs (on lined paper).  This second draft is the one that I graded.  Students were assessed on a scale of 0, 1, or 2.  (If you are relating that to the report card scale, a 0 would be a B, a 1 would be a D, and a 2 would be an S.)  For more details on how your child was evaluated, please click on the parent resources link on the left-hand sidebar and visit the Rubrics page.

Curious as to why students were asked to bring in canned goods when school began?  Besides being a valuable community service activity to support Gifts of Love, the canned goods allowed us to address an important skill: sorting and classifying.  This skill often poses a challenge for kids who must sort items into different categories and explain their logic.  We practice it at different points throughout the year in order to help students prepare for this sort of task, which will appear on the CMTs.

In our activity, we began by discussing what sorting, classifying, and ordering mean.  Then, we made a list of many different possible ways to sort or order the items (by size, canned or boxed, store brand or name brand, vegetarian and non-vegetarian, etc.)  Students worked in pairs to classify the items and wrote an explanation of how they went about sorting or ordering the non-perishables.  It was a fun activity, good community service, and a valuable math lesson.  Click on the thumbnail of the letter to read a thank you letter from Gifts of Love.