"Ms. I didn't know we were having a test!!"

First test day!! Ahh!! We decided to give our students a 12 question equivalent fraction test. We’ve covered fractions many different ways and matching the equivalent fraction should not be that difficult for them. We wanted a major grade to be in our grade book for 3 week progress reports and felt this was a good way of testing their knowledge. It would also allow us to assess how CScope (our new curriculum that were using for the first year!) is really going. Our math department at Lake Air has decided while CScope has great hands on activities, it is a lot of application and not a lot of practice for the students. We only assign homework on two nights a week (I think this is a Lake Air policy), but our homeworks so far have been over division and not fractions. I graded all the tests on Thursday as they were coming in. I do not like doing a 12 question test for the fact that if a student misses 2 they are already down to an 84! When I have my own classroom I will not do it this way, or I will not make the questions be worth so many points. I think the scores were a good representative of what I was expecting. I didn’t have a grade lower than a 44 and they were several 100s in all of my class periods. I didn’t have a chance to talk over with my mentor teacher how she felt about the grades, but I think this is a great start to what we have been doing. Having 120 kids is so different than having 30 (like last year!). I like it because it allows me to have a better comparison to how the students are doing. I know which classes of mine are the brighter ones and which ones are going to be my slower ones! I don’t know if it’s bad to categorize them this way, but it’s definitely true. I definitely feel like my students respect me and that’s nice to feel that way. When I taught the warm up in one of my classes I had a little girl say, “Oo, Ms. L are you teaching today?!” and when I replied just the warm up she said, “Aw, ok.” I thought it was so cute that she was excited for me to be teaching and I hope many more of the students feel the same way! I kind of feel behind since I haven’t started my full teach yet, but I like our plan of on and off every week. So by next week, I will be ready to start and get my full teach rolling!!