Whoops!

I just realized that I never posted blogs from Thursday and Friday of last week... whoops! I'm so sorry...hopefully, your kiddo talked to you about their day. Anyway.

This morning, students that received an 8, 9 or 10/10 on their M4T on last Friday's assessment, got donuts for their perseverance and hard work. I've been offering this incentive for so long and there are just some that still do not take this "test" seriously and complete their best work. So, I rewarded those that did and hopefully, next week, everyone else will get their donuts! Then, in our morning meeting, we shared about our weekend and then read, The Good Little Book. We said the Pledge, wrote our goal for the week and then took our word study pre-test. After we wrote our words in our planners, we read two informational texts that aren't typical. I Don't Like Snakes and The Bear Report. These books are examples of how to make informational text interesting. Next, we wrote topics that we are interested in writing about. In City of Ember, we learned a little more about the setting Lina and Doon live in. We had a community meeting at 10:45 so we only had a little bit of time to read and visit the library. In our community meeting, Mr. Higginbotham shared the beginnings of the R factor training with our students. He discussed, "Press Pause" and "Get your mind right" and "Above the line behaviors." Luckily, this is nothing new for us! We've been pressing pause and staying (trying to) above the line for months! We went directly to special from our meeting, gym, and then had lunch and indoor recess. After recess, while writing our assignments in our planners, we perused the practice AIR portal/website. Homework this week is to practice the format of the AIR test. Some questions ask for multiple answers. There are 2 writings that will need completed in a short amount of time and the writing needs to follow the prompt and accompany a piece of literature. I think it would be a great idea to practice and get familiar with all of this so that the AIR test assesses their knowledge of the content and not be assessed on the format of the test. Our first test is English Language Arts so my suggestion was to work with that one this week and then next week, the Math one and then the week after, the SS one. In Math Workshop, we finished learning the geometry vocabulary WITH hand motions! (Ask your kiddo to show you some of them!) Then, we went on a geometry hunt with the iPads around the building to find real world examples. Once we captured at least one image for each term, we came back and used Explain Everything to "present" our findings. We began Social Studies by assessing our current understanding of government with a little assessment. After completing the assessment, we watched School House Rocks--How a bill becomes a law and I'm sending my vote to college. Unfortunately, even though they were able to use all of their resources, they chose not to and did not do very well, so this will now be an assignment to complete tomorrow and if they do not finish, it will become homework. Our day ended with wonder/i-time.