Thursday Thoughts

Well, today started our cumulative assessments, AKA 2 hours of testing each morning for the next three days. I'm not complaining. These tests aren't nearly as bad as the benchmarks we used to take and I get 2 extra hours of planning done. I have an awesome 2nd period that can stay quiet for 2 hours without much of a battle on my end. Right now my students are either sleeping, drawing with their highlighter, reading, or aimlessly staring around the room.

Tomorrow we have the science assessment, which 7th graders don't take because they don't get tested in science in 7th grade. Weird. I know. So, we're doing The Amazing Race to prepare a little more for the math assessment coming up on Tuesday.

I'm super excited about this! Thanks to my awesome friend Stephanie we have this cool activity to do. Each classroom is going to be a different country. In that country, students have to visit a city where they have a problem to solve with their partner. They have 5 cities in each country to visit and can not get their plane ticket out of the country until they have successfully completed all five problems. Then, they have to solve a review problem to "buy" their plane ticket out the door to the next country. Each student gets to make their own passport today and participate tomorrow morning. It should be a lot of fun! We'll have 200+ 7th graders doing this in the morning while the rest of the school is testing. Since it's a competition, and they're 7th graders, and testing will be going on in the rest of the school, we've established prisons in each country. So, if anyone gets out of hand, they and their partner will have to spend some time in prison. Their goal is to get back to their seat in the class they started in. Once they're there, they have reflection questions to answer and flags to color. Each room is a country that students study in 7th grade and each question is related to that country with some fun fact.

And that my friends, is what you call some serious integrated curriculum!

Oh yea...and our principal got so excited about it that she has invited channel 4, our local school district channel, and the newspaper...so no pressure...

Now, I will go spend the rest of my planning getting the final details together...

Tomorrow morning we'll be in Turkey, Israel, Syria, and Jordan!

PS The spaghetti casserole from several posts ago was delicious! It's very filling and it makes a lot. So, we ate on it for several days. It's easy to do, but several more steps than basic spaghetti. I was so hungry when making it, I almost stopped mid-way and just had regular spaghetti. It was worth the extra effort, but won't be something that I make on a regular basis.