Testing Week

This is my 19th year to teach and my first year to administer the state test. I may be more nervous than my students. I hope I am because I don't want them nervous.

We all have door decorations to encourage the students. I like mine, but if I hadn't procrastinated so long, I know it would have turned out better than it did. It was really sort of a "squirrel" moment when I came up with the idea. I was looking up synonyms for smart, since I hadn't found what I was wanting, I looked up brilliant. Radiant popped up as one along with shining, etc... Well, when I saw radiant, I immediately thought of "Charlotte's Web" and that is where my inspiration came from.

In case you can't read it, Wilbur is saying, "Charlotte, what does it all mean?"
Charlotte replies,  "Wilbur, it means these kids are ready for the test."

I started with the word brilliant and each day I added a new one in the web and put the other word some where else. If i hadn't procrastinated so much, I was going to try and make the words look like spider webs using white pipe cleaners.

On Friday, I let the kids make some posters for the classroom and the hallways. we looked at a few ideas and then I let them do what they wanted. Here's what they came up with.

We did good together, now we can do it apart.

One of the girls said to me, "Oh I guess we should have put the state flag on it for the state test." LOL!

I think the message they were trying to say was something like, You can't be judged by the state test.
We had talked about all of the things the state test couldn't judge about them like creativity , kindness, helpfulness, etc...

I almost cracked up when I saw this. I guess I didn't really read it when they brought it up to me,
 needless to say,  I hung it in the classroom instead of the hallway. ;)

In case you are interested, a friend and I wrote a testing song several years ago, to the tune of "Jingle Bells" you can find it HERE there are several different color borders to choose from.

I'm not sure why, but the school isn't providing the cute incentive snacks this year. So I decided I would do some for my class. Since my printer is out of ink, I thought I would make the signs and put them on my Smartboard if you are interested in using them instead of printing all of the little labels, you can find it HERE. This is a sample.

I am making one more poster for the kids. I got the idea from this pin.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/221591244139998028/

I sent home pieces of construction paper popcorn with the kids so the parents could write a positive message to the class. I'll post a picture of it when I get it finished.

Hope you have a wonderful week!