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BROMWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (214)
2500 East
Fourth Avenue,
80206-4214
(Columbine Street at East Fourth Avenue)

Telephone:
(303) 388-5969
Fax: (720) 424-9355
E-mail: Bromwell@dpsk12.org

Mr. Jonathan Wolfer, Principal

A-6: Mr. Replogle's Fourth Grade Classroom

DPS teachers, facilitators, and principals
Have you found this page because you are interested in the districtwide poetry anthology?
Follow this link: DPS Poetry Initiative

Additional Curriculum Notes...

Sally Foster Sales
Our annual trip to Keystone is expensive, and we manage the costs by having a huge sale of Sally Foster's wrapping paper and gifts early in the school year. Please make an effort to help us with this important event!

The Specials
This year there will be some important changes with the Specials. The Physical Education schedule is being reduced somewhat, and the Art program is being expanded. Our art teacher is new to the building, and will likely welcome parent volunteers and they help they can offer.

Challenge
Ms. Kraybill is our Challenge instruction again this year, offering alternative or supplemental instruction to qualifying students – probably about one hour a week. If you have a question about who qualifies and why, please talk to me, or to her. She will most often work with Challenge students in our classroom. She may also sometimes take these students to Room A-1b for a separate learning activity.

Special Education/PD Center
As with Ms. Kraybill and the Challenge students, the teachers and staff members who work with our L.D. or P.D. students will sometimes work in our classrooms and sometimes in their own rooms (A-0 or A-1a).

Bromwell Eagles Always Care
The B.E.A.C. program was our school's character-education initiative. The B.E.A.C. committee was a team of parents and teache who helped integrate character ed programming into our classroom activities, usually on a weekly basis. Many of the parents who have spear-headed this work in the past, however, have now moved on -- as have the principals and teachers who were involved. I hope this program can make a comeback, and I am particularly interested in finding one or two parent volunteers to help bring it into A-6 this year. Contact me if this is an interest of yours, Mom or Dad!

Drama
In the past, I have produced an annual Social Studies-oriented play for both 4th grade classrooms. Every student in my classroom also acted in scenes for the Shakespeare Festival in May. This year, I am thinking of changing things around a bit, and I'll let you know as my plans develop.

Classroom Books
I love to publish classroom books, and over the years I have created a library featuring student work that I think is pretty darn cool. It's a lot of work, however, so I may be doing less of them unless I can get some parent volunteers to help me put 'em together!

Going Outside
I want my parents to know that I like to take the students outside to work when the weather is nice. Often we will go to the park just north of the school, although there have been a few times when I've walked the class all the way over to the Fillmore Plaza. If you stop by the classroom and we are not there, check with the office. I always tell them our itinerary. Well, almost always...

Final Monday
I am considering making the last Monday of each month a special day that would include change-of-pace curriculum activities such as math games or poetry projects, guest speakers, and trips to the Ross-Cherry Creek library. I would like to have parent help and involvement in these celebratory days, and I have been thinking particularly about having parent volunteers present travelogues – discussing their travels to interesting or historically significant places with the help of photos and artifacts.

My Student Teacher
I will have a student teacher this year, from August to December. His name is Tyler Stroh. Tyler is a pleasant young guy who has done a lot of varied work with children. He is a student at Metropolitan State College and has special interests in music and social studies. I'm sure he'll bring a lot to our classroom experience!

E-mail, E-mail, E-mail!
I will use an Agenda Book or Planner for the first few months of school. After that, I will just send home an e-mail Monday afternoon that lists all the work for the week, along with notes about long-term projects and school issues. I encourage you to print this out for your student and post it in some handy place. I also encourage you to contact me via e-mail with your concerns or questions. I don't like to have the classroom disrupted by direct phone calls, and I don't use voice-mail. There's more about how to contact me at the bottom of this page.

You can expect your student to have a math quiz every three or four weeks. Similarly, we have writing and reading units that are three or four weeks long, and our science and social studies units usually have cumulative monthly tests. Everything is kind of on a monthly schedule, then. Except spelling! There is always a spelling test on Friday, unless Friday is a holiday, and then it is on Thursday, or sometimes even Wednesday.

Our district recommends a minimum of 15 - 30 minutes a day of homework for two or three days a week. One of the key features of the fourth grade homework program is stability, because I have the same expectations and assignments week after week all year long.

Math: 1 page "Study Link" every night, due the next day
Spelling: Review weekly spelling list nightly for Friday's test
Reading: Read 30 minutes nightly, recorded in readling log, due Friday
Writing: Weekly rough draft, assigned Monday and due Friday (about 1 hr weekly)

Note: there is never homework assigned on weekends!

I also assign monthly homework projects – long-term activities usually introduced early in the month and due at the end of the month. Details for those projects are given in a link near the bottom of this page. If students plan ahead and don't procrastinate, they should be able to complete these projects with an additional half hour one or two nights a week.

By my reckoning, this amounts to about 30 minutes of homework, four nights a week. Your student may also have unfinished classroom work (but I hope not!) or extra-credit assignments (which will have variable due dates). Unfinished classwork or late homework will results in a loss of privileges such as Special periods (gym, library, art), lunchtime recess, or Friday Free Time -- and may also receive a lower grade.

I encourage you to create a routine that finds your child doing homework at the same quiet place during the same regular time each and every day. I know that many Bromwell families can become quite busy with an abundance of quality-time activities offered in the larger community! I will always try to respect these commitments, but I also want to point out that I think a student's regular homework time is perhaps the most important learning time each day.

What is good behavior?
At Bromwell, specific examples of good behavior are identified in the "Student Responsibility Pledge" and the associated list of "Characteristics of Bromwell Students." Good behavior is also promoted by the B.E.A.C. program in materials and activities shared with students. In fact, the best "code" I have ever known is the two-step method promoted by our own B.E.A.C. program: "Respect yourself and others" and "Always be learning."

Reprimands and Rewards
Students who display normative behavior will randomly earn stars from me, which will be rewarded at the end of the week with variable prizes. Exceptional or heroic behavior will earn additional stars!

Of course, normative behavior doesn't happen 100% of the time. Children, like adults, sometimes do the wrong thing just because they are human. We believe that "wrong choices" or "difficult behaviors" don't make a student a bad person. They are a part of any student's life and every classroom experience.

Students who make persistent "wrong choices" will be given a verbal warning and a slash mark by their name on the chart. A second occurrence merits another slash, and the two slashes then form an X. A third time makes for a new slash which can then (at a fourth occurrence) become another X and so on. Students will always be notified of their infractions, and only teachers can give slashes.

At the end of the week, X 's are tallied. Students with no X 's or only one enjoy Friday Free Time, a half-hour recess given from 2:45 to 3:15 at the end of each week. Students with more X 's will spend some or all of that time in a common classroom in detention. This is how the system works:

A = no X 's -- earn Friday Free Time
& a possible additional reward
B = one X -- earn Friday Free Time
C = two X 's -- miss half of Friday Free Time
D = three X 's -- miss all of Friday Free Time
F = four X 's -- miss all of Friday Free Time & weekend writing assignment

Five or more X 's constitute a severe disruption pattern and will require a conference with the student, teacher, and parents.

Continuum of Management
This management plan builds upon the management patterns of Third Grade classrooms and, particularly, incorporates specific parts of the management system used for several years by the Fifth Grade program.

I promote the reading of appropriate comics because... well, because I have always loved comics myself. There are a lot of inappropriate comics out there, but I'm careful to select comics that promote reading and literacy skills. For more information on my views on comics, look for the link near the bottom of this page.

My classroom book collection was created with a lot of work, and at great expense. Students are allowed to use my books in the classroom but they are NOT allowed to take them home. My books have been bought from other teachers, and at used book sales held by various stores and libraries. Some of them are even discards from our own school library. But no matter where they have come from, my books are all identified by a silver or gold "R" in the corner of the inside front cover (or sometimes the title page). The "R" is usually in a circle, but may be in a triangle or even a picture of some sort -- I have had several students help me mark the books over the years, and they tend to get creative that way!

If one of my books happens to end up in your home, please have your student return it immediately. Students who damage my books will be required to replace them.

Our program uses a number of textbooks, too. They are Everyday Mathematics (developed by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project); The Daybook of Critical Reading and Writing (published by the Great Source Education Group, a Houghton Mifflin company); a new Spelling book (more on this when I know it better!); Harcourt Science 9 (published by Harcourt School Publishers).

One of my professors always encouraged me to include the question "So what?" in my lesson plans. "Colorado achieved statehood in 1876... so what?" "Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first mystery story... so what?" It was her way of pushing me to lead students beyond the simple memorization of facts and into the deeper territory of meaning. In that spirit, it seems appropriate that this classroom web page should include material beyond our curriculum outline, schedule, and homework policy...

I live in the Bromwell neighborhood with my wife Lara Newton, a Jungian psychoanalyst and the author of Brothers and Sisters: Discovering the Psychology of Companionship (Spring Journal Books, 2007). I'm the proud parent of two kids: my son now lives in Portland, and my daughter attends the New England Conservatory in Boston. She began attending Bromwell in Kindergarten and last year graduated from high school in DPS.

I have a B.A. in English Literature from Michigan State University (I grew up in Battle Creek, home of Kellogg's) and an M.A. in Education from the University of Colorado/Denver. I worked previously at Bethesda Psychiatric Hospital and taught previously at Ebert Elementary School. I love reading and art, and I love working with kids! For another view of what I bring to your child's education, go to Mr. R's Portfolio. You can also look at Mr. R's Testimonials.

Below are links to hopefully-helpful materials I've prepared for Bromwell students and their families over the years.

The Age of Harry Potter
Comics in the Classroom?
Shakespeare for Kids

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How to contact your 4th grade teachers...

Not sure what to bring to school?
Look at the Grade 4 Supply List and get it all straight!