Week 12, how did we get here already?
Last week was MSP week and even though my 8th graders only tested 2 days out of the week, we were in testing mode for 4 of the 5 days. Because of this, the week was sort of a wash, academically. We knew that the students wouldn’t have the ability to make it through an actual lesson, and understandably so… they just took a 2 ½ hour standardized test. Robin and I tried to keep it as “academic” as possible, but the week consisted of a lot of rounds of Scategories and Balderdash. It was fun to see their creative/fun sides. I even saved three of my favorite Balderdash definitions.
On Friday I learned an important lesson about things not going as planned because of teacher error. The instruction sheet I made for graphing TOTALLY didn’t make sense to the students (partially because I didn’t proof read it), which created a little bit of chaos in the computer lab. We made it through and I retyped the directions making them more explanatory (hopefully) and we will try it again on Monday.
This upcoming week is the last week of my social studies unit on human/environment interaction. Most of the week students will be working on a letter written from themselves 25 years in the future describing what their country looks like and how the people live – they’ll even have to draw and “Then and Now” picture. I’m excited for the assignment and I hope the students are too. The following week is the final week of their poetry unit. After that Robin will take over again as the “full-time” teacher and I’ll sort of be roaming around. She’ll be gone for a few days, so I’ll teach then, but I’ll also use the time to observe some other classrooms.
