Week Twenty-Two, February 18-22, 2013
So life has been extra crazy lately and I have been trying desperately to update this blog! Whew! So here goes….
Last week was….interesting…
Monday we didn’t have school. On Tuesday I worked with the students setting goals, and calming any nerves in preparation for their Spring Benchmark that was to take place on Wednesday.
So on Wednesday we took our Spring Math Benchmark…the kids worked SUPER hard and I was so proud of the work I was seeing. BUT, when we got scores back, I was not thrilled. Now let me preface by saying this was a brand new Benchmark that myself and 5 other educators wrote. We tried to make the questions much more difficult so it would be an accurate representation of the STAAR (our state test). Well after taking the exam AND looking at the scores from the other elementarys in my district, it was clear that we made the exam way too hard. I had 40% passing;40%???? Seriously?? Many of the questions were 3-5 steps long, so yes we see the error of our ways, haha.
But it was a great discussion for me and my students to have. Instead of being “beat down” by our scores we’ve taken it as a challenge that we will do better. Am I going to start teaching test formatted questions?? NO WAY! The other schools did and their scores were far below mine, so I will continue on without teaching any test formatted questions.
Thursday they took their Reading Benchmark, and then Friday we had to do a TELPAS writing and my class learned how to Tweet! Because yes, we now have our own class twitter account!! Check it out 🙂 @ClassNesloney
I’m excited about this next week as we continue on our journey of learning and having fun with math!
