a formula for caffeine

I'm going to need a venti hot chocolate to jumpstart my tomorrow...and several days to come.
Thursday: science fair
Friday and Saturday: forensics tournament
Let's just say I'm a night owl...and all three of these require crack of dawn shuttles for my beloved daughter. LOL! :)

We are counting down to Spring Break...only 5 more lessons. And I've decided one of those five will be a pretest for state testing. I'm excited to pretest before break so I can get things organized at my own pace. I'll have to come back and give you an explanation as to how I approach Benchmark Bootcamp. Anyone have a state testing review routine? Do share!

One simple change I made last year was to teach my students the five content strands they would encounter during spring testing. I'm not sure I actually did this on purpose. But when it came to the week of testing I realized knowing the test format was a MUST! My algebra students gathered in my room each morning before the test so that they could sharpen pencils and overall just to support each other. They amazed me on the second morning when they said, "Mrs. Tilmon, we're going to have a non-linear function today...can we review the basics of quadratics for a few minutes?" When I asked how they could be certain of their upcoming questions, they rattled off the three areas that had been covered the day before and that they knew which two areas were left for that day's test. Nothing compares to that type of preparation...there is freedom in knowledge. Their anxiety was significantly reduced just from the practice of classifying problems into strand types!


The photo above shows a cover page to a practice set of geometry open-response items. The five strands are listed with a brief description of each one. Needless to say...I've been prepping classification by strand throughout the year! ;)

Chat soon...
Enjoy the end of your week...make it count!