Ask Me About Monday, September 29

Today we worked on finishing beautiful pictures of Oo's we started on Friday.  We listened to a story called A Home for Bird then drew pictures to help retell the beginning, middle and end of the story.  The children will be bringing these home tomorrow and will tell you all about this story.  We noticed that often picture books have many details in the illustrations that give clues about what will happen in the story.  We made really great predictions about what would happen in the book by studying the cover and thinking about the title.  As we read, we were able to change or confirm our predictions.  We spent more time testing today as the kids worked to illustrate.  The KRA test the children are taking now is a new test and is quite lengthy.  I was hoping to start reading groups, but after beginning the test I soon found it would be more advantageous to dig in and get it out of the way as fast as possible.  We are almost finished with the reading portion of the test.  The math part I will start tomorrow.  Like the mClass test we took earlier, these tests are one on one so it takes a lot of time to complete the testing in a class of 25.  The children went to media center today and learned about how the books are shelved.  Ask them about the letters on the binding of their library books.  They were very excited to show me all about it!  We took the first part of the MAP P test today.  This is a test done on the computer for math.  The children did very well, although some still struggled with the mouse.  At least they have stopped trying to touch the screen to make the computer work!  Tomorrow I will give those who need more mouse practice time to work on the computers so next week will be easier for them.  I gave the children a little time to build after the test, although I did test a few more kids during this time.  Hopefully the math portion of the test will go a little faster and we can get into a normal routine of reading groups very soon.  Tomorrow I will take some time and introduce Just Right Books that I have roughly leveled so that I can match readers to baskets of books they can use to read independently.  This should give them some practice reading books that are just right for their reading level.  
I will send home our weekly homework tomorrow.  I decided to let them play instead of make them stop early since they had so much testing today.  Thanks for hanging in there with us while we work through all this testing. 
Juliet