Friday, February 11, 2011

The Great Debate


We had our "Whether the Colonies Should Have Independence from Great Britain" debate today. I was SOOOO impressed.

Each student took part in a panel of Loyalists or Patriots. First, each presented their opinion, and then they got to question each other. The group of students who were watching evaluated each person for 1) how well they knew their character, and 2) how well they presented their character.

Great job! The only bad thing was that I forgot my camera at home.

Monday, February 7, 2011

We've signed up for a great research compilation site called diigo.com. Students can highlight important parts of articles they read on the Internet, take notes online, and then post all their research to one place.
To do all this at home as well as at school they will need to download the diigo toolbar to your computer. It's easiest to do in Google Chrome, but can be done in any browser. (The students might need more help in other browsers.)
Simple go to www.diigo.com, select tools at the top of the page, and then download the tool bar.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Spirit Week and Valentines Day

Spirit Week is next week. These are the themes for each day of Spirit week:

Monday - Future me

Tuesday - Hippie day

Wednesday - Wacky Wednesday

Thursday - School colors (at this point this is a no jean day- but this might change) Pep Rally

Also on Tuesday they will start selling Valentine Candy Grams.


MAP Test Class Results

These are the statistics that show whether students achieved their target improvement or not in the MAP test. As you can see, 91% of the students achieved between typical and high growth in reading and math, which is to be celebrated. 100% of the students achieved target improvement in language usage. As a teacher, I'm thrilled, although still bothered by the 9% who did not achieve expected growth.