Search This Blog

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

On Demand!

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend!

Tomorrow I will be starting the Fountas and Pinelle mid year reading testing. This is the form of assessment we use to help base your child's reading abilities and their "reading level." The goal for 5th grade is to be at a level U by the end of the school year. Hopefully, with all the reading they do in class and at home, the students should have moved up a letter or two by now, depending on where they started at the beginning of the year. This means that we will be having a guest teacher the next two afternoons. The kids know her- she's awesome.

They will be with me for writing both days, however.
Tomorrow, we will be doing an opinion on demand. The kids are already pretty frustrated with me because they just had to write their informative post on demand, (45 minutes of non stop writing) on Friday. The way our writing curriculum works is that we are assessing writing with a post test and a pre test. This is the "pre test" for opinion writing, and we wont be taking the "post test" until after we finish our argumentative essays in March-ish.

What that means is, the kids will be spending the writing period tomorrow writing about an issue and taking a stance on that issue. They are welcome to bring in any information that will help them prove their point.

Some ideas that I expressed today were:
1. Should we have longer school days?
2. Should we have a year long school year or keep summers off?
3. Should we drink chocolate milk at school? Eat pizza?
4. Should we have more recess
4. Should teacher's assign homework?

Students should be able to :

  • write an intro
  • state your opinion or claim
  • give reason and evidence
  • organize your writing
  • acknowledge counterclaims
  • use transition words
  • write a conclusion 



On another note, our very own, Hansen, will be competing in the District Spelling Bee tomorrow night at the PAC! We are so excited for him to represent our school and our class! Good luck Hansen! We will be cheering for you!!


No comments:

Post a Comment