... Thursday, May 8

Sorry that it has been awhile--stressful times: i.e. my daughter broke her foot, my husband is finally back from China! :), OAA's...

Last Friday, we prepared ourselves for testing by moving the furniture and seats to give us more room to work. We also played a Vocabulary Quiz Game Show on the Smart Board.

On Monday, we focused our economic discussion on entrepreneurs and used Skype to learn about starting a business. We Skyped with Trew, one of the founders of Tom + Chee-a new restaurant coming to Hilliard in June with a grilled cheese and tomato soup specialty. Hopefully, your kiddo told you about this discussion. (I tweeted about it too, as did Mr. Hennes on our Alton Darby twitter feed and we were retweeted by HCSD!) Another thing we did to prepare for testing was to use a video game remote CONTROL to focus on the plethora of things we CAN control with the OAA's. This was really informative to them and I think they felt empowered.

On Tuesday, students worked extremely hard on the Reading OAA. I was uber impressed! By the way, they LOVED their notes of encouragement from home!! Thank you to those that sent notes in!!  That afternoon, we completed obstacle courses in a group special with 4th and 5th grade students and practiced math for the next OAA.

Yesterday, after our Brain Gym exercises, we took the Math OAA. I didn't see as much effort as I did the day before but maybe they were more confident in Math? I'm not sure but I let them keep their booklets for a little longer and I noticed that quite a few of them went back and checked and re-checked their work. They each got a medal for completing the OAA!! I was out in the afternoon because Ella was getting her cast put on but Mr. S filled in and did a good job. There were a few issues but I took care of them this morning and hopefully all was resolved. They had a lesson introduces Genius Hour and I'm going to let your child tell you more about what this is.

Today, we began with the students catching me up on Genius Hour from yesterday and finished picking their topics. Then, after Music, we re-arranged the tables, thanks to the design of Samuel, and then played Farkle and/or Yahtzee! After a blazing and sweaty recess, we went back to the Media Center for a second lesson on Genius Hour. When we returned to our room, we completed the work that was started yesterday in Reader's Workshop and Writer's Workshop, read silently, visited the library and finished the Thank You letter to Trew from Tom + Chee for Skyping with us.

It's been such a busy, crazy week and we're not even finished yet!