Benchmark

Our morning was taken up by the need to give a Reading Benchmark to assess student needs as we head into the new year.

We did have shorter classes this afternoon.  Again, it was kind of a catch up day.  I lost 17 students to UIL yesterday and needed to have them complete a few small tasks.  First, any student who did not fill out our Think30 Reward form was asked to do so.  I have set a goal for students to PASS 30 Think Through Math lessons by our STAAR test.  I want to reward the 5th graders who achieve this goal with something special and I wanted their input.  So, I had them fill out a form telling me where they would like to go.  I want everyone to have a say, so I needed to give them time to tell me!

Secondly, I am not only using my Math Benchmark (which I will give Friday) to assess needs, I am also using a scientifically based RTI (Response to Intervention) program called I Do, We Do, You Do by Dr. Sherri Dobbs Santos to assess and address these needs.  I gave the baseline assessment yesterday and needed to have the others do this as well.

Thirdly, we pulled out our Twelve Days of Christmas packet and compared answers.  Would you believe that there are 364 gifts given!  The costs of these gifts was an ASTOUNDING $116,273.08!

Then we were able to get to a little math activity called Would You Rather.  I love these activities because they are real-world, high interest, and a little challenging!  However, this being the Christmas season, I wanted to connect this activity to Christmas.  So, I showed a clip from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer called "Silver and Gold".  Then, I posed the question:

Would you rather have:

There is a specific way that I want the kids to approach these types of questions.  1) make a prediction, 2) find the needed information, 3) solve the problem and 4) draw a conclusion.  I also want them to get used to seeing and using proper mathematically language, so I provided some sentence stems to make the process easier:

• Predict:  

I predict that I would rather have ___________ because I think _________________________.

• Draw Conclusions:

I can conclude from my information that my prediction was ___________ because ______________.

Finally, we used the time we had left to work on Think Through Math.... we need to get to 30 passed lessons!  During this time, I called students individually to see their scores on their last unit test.  We placed these scores on the progress bars so that students can visually see any growth or need for growth.  We are using this as a motivator to see where we need to be and how far we need to go to get there!