Quiet and Industrious

It was a quiet and productive day in room 19. We started the day by finishing up some of the watercolors that the students had started yesterday. That may seem like an odd way to start the morning, but it was a practical solution to dealing with wet art papers. After the students did their art, they did the "Checking Skills" section of the Open Court test and finished the rough draft of the composition. This is the most important of the writing assessments for the students because their score will appear on the report cards as the "Language Arts Performance Assessment" and they will receive an "invitation" to attend summer school if their score is below a 3. This gave them some motivation to work hard!

After recess we did a gallery walk where we looked at some of the watercolors. Many of these were quite good! I will post some of them on the blog tomorrow. The students have also become quite good at giving compliments to each other, very specific praise using art terminology. We then reviewed a the gold rush era and the students took the Chapter 6 test in history. As usual, this was an open-book, open-note exam so it helped to develop reading skills as much as assess factual knowledge. While a few students were finished quite early, most took some or all of the time between lunch and PE to work on this as well. Results will be on the gradebook soon.

At PE, about half the class played soccer while the other half did handball. Both groups seemed to have a good time. We came back to the classroom where students chose writing response partners. They read the rough drafts of the OCR essay which they had started earlier, and then moved on to do the final drafts.

Home Studies: (1) Do "Diagram," Math, page 433, numbers 1-7 only. (2) Do the "Chapter Review/Test," Math, page 434 and the "Cumulative Review," Math, page 435.