Weekly Memo - Benchmark Time Again

It's that time once again for Benchmarks. These will be the final Benchmarks of the year and the last ones before the CRCT. Benchmarks are very important to teachers, because they allow us to see what students already know and what we still need to work on with them prior to the CRCT. Make sure you are sending them to school with the knowledge that these tests are very important for both themselves and their teachers. The schedule for Benchmarks will be the following:

Monday - Reading
Tuesday - Language Arts
Wednesday - Math
Thursday - Science
Friday - Social Studies

Due to the Benchmark testing, we will be on an altered schedule this week, although students will see all their classes each day, they might be shorter in length and in a different order than normal.

The Benchmark will count as a test grade for all of my classes.

Outside of the Benchmark testing, we will continue class as normal (just in smaller increments). In Literature, we will begin reading "The Smallest Dragonboy" by Anne McCaffrey, which will be our first reading in our  thematic unit "Not As It Seems." In Read 180, we will continue with our short story "Louisa, Please Come Home" by Shirley Jackson.

For homework, we will once again begin our CRCT Practice homework. The homework assignment will be up on Monday, before the end of the day. It will be due before the end of the week. Also, we have a new part of the homework, and that's using Study Island to help provide students with extra practice on skills that they could use work on leading into the CRCT. For students that have never used Study Island, the info is as follows:

Link: http://www.studyisland.com
Username: Your Student Number (same as your password to log in for most students)
Password: password

If this doesn't work, make sure you see me. While students can work on just about any Reading skills (or for that matter, any skills in any subject areas), I have a practice test for them that works on a few skills I wanted them to try-out.

Now let me talk about last week some. Last week is when students' major book report project was due, and I was very happy that the majority of students turned their projects in. I have been busily trying to grade all of them, so students should look at either Tuesday or Wednesday to get their grades back for their projects. While there were a lot of good grades for these projects, and truth be told, there were some of the best projects I've seen all year, there were also those that were not so good. The main reason why some students lost points was simply because they didn't read the directions on the project, and because of that, some students didn't turn in whole sections of their project. Please make sure you read all the directions when doing anything, to make sure you are doing everything that is necessary to complete your assignments.

This week students will receive Team Progress Reports, so be on the look-out for them on Wednesday. They will need to be signed and returned the next day.

As of Monday, we will be 26 days until the CRCT.

Bring it on!