What a busy few weeks it’s been in Room 209!  Besides the TUSS projects and presentations, we’ve been working hard on new math units, a special reading project, and more!

In math, we’re wrapping up unit 10, which is a fun unit about geometry – in particular, symmetry.  We’ll be testing later this week (or early next week), so stay tuned!  Because this was such a short unit, I also have several students who are still finishing up the recent math assessment.  Once I have them all turned in, I’ll be sure to share the results with you.  On that note, I want to apologize for the delay in sharing other recent math assessment results with you.  I just realized that I never sent the scores home, and I’m very sorry for the mistake.  Score sheets will go home with kids tomorrow.

We’ve had several assessments over the past few weeks.  The Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) is administered to students individually twice each year (fall and spring).  The kids have done a great job working on these over the past few weeks, and I’ve been very pleased with the students’ growth.  We also just completed the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) assessment.  This assessment gives students a series of cloze-style passages in which they must choose the correct words to fit into a blank spot within a paragraph.  Finally, we have a few CFAs that we’ll work on over the next few days.

Last week, we went on a field trip to the Children’s Museum in West Hartford.  What a great trip!  We started off enjoying a planetarium show about the sun, earth, and moon.  This tied in perfectly to the kids’ recent science unit by the same name.  Later, the kids had an opportunity to try out some interactive stations that introduced them to a variety of concepts – among them, electricity.  In the coming weeks, the kids will learn about electricity through a unit that Mr. Giannini and I teach jointly.

Stay tuned!  In the next update:  Number the Stars, Junior Achievement, and Expository Writing!  Also, be sure to check out the first student article on the site!  You can find it right below this post.

I’m going to be talking about the computer station! You can do so many delightful things there. For example, you can make a hilarious story one sentence at a time! Everybody is allowed to join in. You can also write a serious story one sentence at a time! Also, if the computers didn’t have something wrong with them you could go on ichat. [Mr. Moss's comment:  iChat is configured to restrict conversation to our classroom computers ONLY, and I keep a log of the chats, so this is a safe environment for the kids.]  Let’s hope both of them start working! You can also go on the calculator!!! Push in some outstanding numbers and watch them transform! If you want to have a whole lot of fun, you can play Math Magician and practice your math facts!!! If you write a super fantastic article, you might get the chance to paste it on the Mr. Moss’s class website. Isn’t that exciting??? That’s only some of it. There is much more!!! This is why we are so lucky to have the computer station!!!