It’s hard to believe that it’s already the middle of October.  We had parent/teacher conferences this week.  The fall party is coming up in two weeks, and before you know it, we will be into the holiday season.  Our classroom has been a busy place. In fact I’ve been so busy, that this blog has been sadly neglected.

We have been spending way more time than I would like doing testing.  This year students are taking pretests and post tests for each unit in both math and reading.  The reading tests are being taken on-line.  That has been time consuming, first, to learn how to do it, then to help each student put in their unique code, and to share iPads with other classrooms so that we all have access to the necessary technology.   The positive side to these tests is that students immediately see their results, but I do worry that students will hurry through them.  I also wonder if reading comprehension is different when reading on-line as opposed to on paper.

It’s been slow going, but we still have managed to get started with our Kidblogs.  Before we put anything on line, however, we wrote paper blogs.  We learned about blogging and how blogs work.   Students wrote their first blog post on paper.  They glued their post to a poster and decorated it to make it look like a blog.  Then we hung them around the room. On top of the bulletin boards, on the white board, taped to bookshelves. To learn how to make comments, we saw a video created by Mrs. Yollis and her students in California.  Here is a link to Mrs. Yollis’s blog.
Armed with pencils and sticky notes we all moved around the room reading each other’s blogs and writing comments on the sticky notes.  We stuck the sticky notes to the blogs.  Some people tried to sneak back to their own blogs to read the comments, but they had to wait until the end.  When we were finished, everyone got their own blogs back and got to read the comments that had been left for them.

This was the first time I tried the paper blog idea, but I will definitely do it again.  The original idea comes from middle school teacher, Karen McMillan.  You can read about it on her blog, Notes from McTeach.

In an earlier post I wrote about Organizing My Classroom Library.  It  is working great!  I’m really impressed with the job my class librarians are doing in selecting new books for the class to choose from.  At the suggestion of Tracy Mercier, I adopted shopping days, and that has solved the problem of people who browse for books all the time, but never read.  On top of those advantages, I really love the way it looks.  It’s easier for students to put books away and much less cluttered.

Monday begins our 8th week of the school year, and we will be taking a writing assessment this week.  What’s going on in your classroom?  Is testing as big a part of your school day as it is ours?