It's Not Good-Bye, It's See You Later

It's not good-bye, it's see you later...I can't believe that we had our "last class" in Adult Learning last week.  Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to our last class celebration this week.  I have conferences that I need to prepare for this upcoming week.  I hope everyone has fun, and good luck to everyone next semester!  And now, to wrap up this semester, all of my projects are complete! :)  Corstina, Shane, and I are finishing up our wild card project.  We are using Pearltrees and Powtoon, to tell about coding.  Everything is looking good so far!

The End is Near...

Believe it or not, we only have two weeks left! I knew that this semester was going to fly by, because it seems like everything flies by anymore.  With that being said, it feels nice to be on top of things since there is such little time left.  I really worked on things each week as the semester went by, which was great, because now that the end is near, it's nice not to have to cram everything in at the end.  I'm now finished with all of my attribute slides, my attribute lesson, and I am in the process of updating my weebly.  If you click on the link, you can check out all of my work this semester.

Busy, Busy, Week

What a busy week that just passed.  I was busy preparing for an observation, getting ready for parent visitation, and working on my grades.  On top of all of that, it must have felt extra long because of the short week we had prior.  However, now I can say short observation check, parent visitation check, grades check.  Even though American Education Week is technically this week coming up, we had our parent visitation last week.  When the parents visited, I did a reading lesson in which we used the iPads.  We used Nearpod for a lesson on nouns.  The entire class was on task and engaged in the lesson. Nearpod is definitely one of my favorite apps to use in the classroom!! We also did a math lesson on finding missing parts of ten and a social studies lesson on leaders.  For that lesson I read Duck for President, which is a great story for this time of year or for February and President's Day.  Then, we talked about and wrote what we would do if we were president.  I had some very creative answers from I would go to meetings all day to I would make China part of the United States to I would have a giant pool with a water slide.  Oh how I love first grade!! :)

It's All About the Test

Some of you may have heard my new favorite song by Meghan Trainor All About the Bass.  Well I was thinking about it and teaching has become all about the test which brings me to my post for this week.  As a first grade teacher, my kids do not have to take any state tests, however we are still feeling the effects of "it's all about the test."  We are encouraged to get our kids on the computer as much as we can since when the PARCC comes around they will be expected to take the test on the computer.  We are also encouraged to use the PARCC vocabulary so that they can be exposed to the type of questioning and vocabulary that they will be eventually be seeing on the PARCC.  Thankfully, in first grade, we can still add some fluff to our lessons, and it's not ALL about the test, but I know in the testing grades it really is ALL about the test.  I found this interesting article from The Press of Atlantic City that talks about how the convention this past week was focused on the test.