Some solutions arrive at a moment of desperation.
I have been giving the online ELL test this month. One of the first graders became so stressed he started sobbing and I couldn't convince him to finish. As anyone who has given the mandated state tests knows, this is not a valid excuse for not completing it. I wish it were.
We decided to test him alone in the counselor's office, and I brought a chart like the one pictured above. I put a star on each of the questions he had already answered and the counselor drew lines where he could stop to take a break. I crossed off the numbers at the bottom, because the test had 95 questions. Each time he answered a question, we checked off the remaining boxes. He had a visual of how he was progressing and so he finished.
No, I don't think that a 95 question test is developmentally appropriate for first graders. I wonder what we are doing to our students. Some days I advocate for my students by trying to change the system. Other days I advocate for my students, by getting them through it.
If you need a chart like this one, click here.
"Saying nothing sometimes says the most."
Emily Dickinson
Have a good week,
All week long I have been celebrating a milestone here at Artistry of Education. To celebrate its 1000th posts, I have been offering a week of digital swag. Here is today's freebie.
The prefix milli means 1000. I wrote a short worksheet with five words that start with milli: milliliter, milligram, milliliter, millisecond, and millipede.
To download this worksheet, click here.
On Wednesdays I usually do a book review, but to be honest I didn't find a book I loved that fit the theme of 1000.
For those of you just stopping by for this post, Artistry of Education has hit a milestone of 1000 posts. I am celebrating by giving away freebies each day for a week that are related to 1000.
What I did notice is that many books that have the word 1000 in the title are How-to books. This gives me an opportunity to introduce a new genre to my students. People create all kinds of things for their homes and gardens, then write up the directions for others to follow. (Caution: some of the how to books are not ones I want my students to read. Don't just send them off on a computer search.)
Before we had a district curriculum, I organized my literacy lessons by genre. I have published several of those lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers and Teacher's Notebook. Click here to see my Teaching Genre series.
While I don't expect students to write 1000 ways to do something, I do have a free writing lesson called Top Ten. You can download Top Ten from my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Top Ten is also available in my Teacher's Notebook store.
Come back tomorrow for the final piece of digital swag. On Friday, I will post a round up of the week in case you missed something.
Thank you for stopping by this week. I am celebrating the thousandth post on Artistry of Education. All week long, I am sharing freebies that have a thousand theme.
Yesterday I shared a mini-research project called A Thousand Years Ago. Today I am having students travel through time in the opposite direction and imagine what life will be like a thousand years from now.
The questions on the two assignments are similar on purpose. I want students to think about how people meet their needs based on their surroundings.
To download the organizer for A Thousand Years from Now, please click here.
