Slippery!

Well, we made it to school in that treacherous weather this morning! I hope you all made it safely where you were headed. Geesh! We began our day with our M4T as well as some more tidying up-this time, it was our hermit crabs that benefitted! We changed their sand and cleaned out their cages. Then, we went on to complete our Checkpoint Writing Assessment. The state of Ohio says that all 4th graders need to take a district wide writing assessment and so we had 45 minutes to complete the writing process from start to finish--I know, only 45 minutes! Anyway, they did great and came up with some amazing topics to write their opinion essay. So, we've completed 2 rounds of SRI and SMI (Scholastic Reading/Math Inventory), 2 rounds of our Fountas and Pinnell reading assessments (where I pull students independently and listen to them read and discuss what they read--this is where we get a "level" for them) and completed our writing assessment. Now, all we have left is 10 days of state testing... :) I know it seems and feels daunting and not what is best for kids but it is what it is. We'll be doing some things to prepare for these new assessments over the next few weeks but don't worry--we'll make it work! I'm confident that these kiddos will shine! Now, off my soapbox.
After a very smelly gym (I had a mini-chat with them about proper hygiene because they STUNK today!), we took what we thought was going to be a virtual field trip to Mt. Rushmore! However, we ended up going to Texas A&M where we heard a Q & A with Barbara Bush. At the tail end, we did learn about a new thing called Augmented Reality which we thought was pretty cool and I'm going to be looking into some apps to see if we can work with this cool new technology. In Math Workshop today, after some independent math time, students worked on an Exemplar, or a real world math problem, and did a pretty good job explaining their thinking in writing about how they found their answer. They are pretty much on point for where they should be with fractions--woohoo! Finally, we completed our day with Science where they are becoming inventors and to share their work, they will be creating a "pitch" like on Shark Tank!