Monday, November 14, 2011

More Testing! (Sigh)

 For the last few years, after each unit in Open Court Reading there was a unit test. They were not that good, but teachers were used to giving them and the students knew how to take them. This year, with the Treasures reading program, the district has now instituted something called the "Literacy Periodic Assessment." This is, I think, in most ways an improvement on the old OCR tests. These look a lot more like the CST and while the reading comprehension questions are harder, the vocabulary and word study questions are fairer. , Also, there's only three of these tests, not five like there used to be. We started on the first of these tests this week, and we'll be doing a little bit of it every day.

We also started on double digit multiplication this week. This is a tough skill to master at first, and the way that it is explained in the math book is conceptually helpful, but not that real life helpful. Parents can feel free to explain the short way to do this to the students at any time. We'll be introducing that on Wednesday.

Homework:  (1) Do "Arrays and an Expanded Algorithm," pages 141-143 in the math book even numbers only. Also do"Crazy Cube" on the back. (2) Do pages 119 and 120 in the Treasure Practice Book. (3) Write this week's spelling words in syllables. You may use a dictionary to help you.  (4) Do the multiplication worksheet.

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