The morning Poster Session was a huge success... More info to come!

Then, we hosted some guests in our classroom and explained how we do Goal-Setting in our classroom!

"Oh my goodness!"

"No way!

"Woah!"

Kids are discovering some amazing properties of matter through experimenting and observing chemical and physical changes. Today was just a "Water Test," but soon we'll be experiencing more complex reactions with simple household products. Our final "test" will be to investigate a crime scene and use our knowledge of these chemical tests to determine which products were used to commit the crime!

Hello Parents!

I hope you are all enjoying the snowy weather we're having! It's meant a lot of shoveling for me, but at least I'm getting a little exercise! It sounds like the kids have been enjoying sledding & building snow forts!

I wanted to let you know that I sent home with each child the "Tentative Blog Assignments" checklist for this trimester in their classroom mail today. I've also posted a PDF of it below. I am asking that students get caught up on blogs before NEXT weekend (2/15) so I can grade them over the weekend and then give them feedback on 2/18. This will be called their "Blogs BEFORE Feedback" grade on the report card.

They will have another week to improve their blog posts (just like last trimester) and I will grade them again on the weekend of 2/22. This will be called their "Blogs AFTER Feedback" grade on the report card. This will be twice the points of the "Blogs BEFORE Feedback" grade.

If you can help your child meet these deadlines for me, it will help a lot. There is a small chance that I will fall one week behind. This extra time is built into the schedule and I will let you know if that happens! Thanks so much in advance! - Paul

Students will be taking the Cogat tests next week. I put some information about the Cogat tests below (but it's just what I found online - nothing official). There's nothing students have to do to prepare, other than get a good night's sleep and eat a healthy breakfast. Here is our tentative schedule (this blog post will change if needed)...

1. Monday, 2/5 at 10:55am (Verbal Battery)
2. Tuesday, 2/6 at 9:10am (Quantitative Battery)
3. Thursday, 2/8 at 9:10am (Non-Verbal Battery)

Our mini-lesson today was to ask the author of our Literature Circle book a "deep question." One that really makes the author and/or others think. I also asked the students to answer their own question in the way they think the author will answer it on their video discussion. The final step was tweeting out our question and our video discussion to the author! We received some responses back. Here are a few. (I'll add more as I get them)...