Assessing

Fridays are a good day for assessing progress in many classrooms, and room 19 is no exception. We do not only have tests on Friday, nor is Friday only about taking tests, but it is the day when the students are most likely to be tested. Today we had a math quiz, a spelling test, and a reading test. This weekend I will send links to the gradebook for those people who have given me their email addresses and you can see how well your child did.

Students also did so assessing of their own, in this case the growth of their plants. They are justifiably excited about how well their terrariums are doing! We started work on a crossword puzzle with lots of words about environments. Last year, this caused a bit of a meltdown as students tried to do a crossword puzzle for the first time, but this year our students took to it like the proverbial ducks to water.

After recess, we read another chapter of Island of the Blue Dolphins. The students went to their different mixing activities: art, drama, or physical education. We finished the day, as usual, with math. Topic 2 in the math book deals with rounding and estimation. This is such an important life skill for the students, but they really don't like it much. Chapters like this are when math teachers begin to understand what it's like to be a dentist!

Homework:  (1) Finish the "Exploration 1 Vocabulary" crossword. (2) Do "Rounding," pages 24-25 in the math book. "Quick Math" on the back of the answer sheet is relatively easy, so there's no reason why everybody shouldn't do it.