Five For Friday - Test Prep and Angry Birds

You know what I love even better than Friday?  Friday before a long weekend ... ahhhhhhhhh ... much needed!!!  It's been a long week ... but a fun week ... so I guess all is good.  Looking forward to some quality time with the family this weekend (and hoping for some sun).

Friday also means it's time for Five for Friday - I LOVE this linky - I seriously look forward to it all week, planning what pics I'm going to include.  Make sure you check out some of the other Five for Friday posts at Doodlebugs Teaching.

Grade 6 testing is just 7 days away for us, so we've been doing a lot of test prep in the classroom.  Earlier this week we did a 4-corner sticky note activity.  After students had completed a practice activity, I gave each student a different coloured sticky note (5 different colours in total) and asked them to write down their answer to a particular question.  They then had to find their group members (students with matching coloured sticky notes) and place their sticky notes in the 4 corners of the paper they had.  After reading through and discussing all the answers, they then had to collaborate and combine their answers to make the best possible answer.  I LOVED this ... and I'm going to try it out in math next week.

The next day we started to make our test prep bookmarks.  We took the answering the question strategies we've been studying and applying in math, and wrote them on these bookmarks.  We are going to do the same thing with our language strategies early next week, and then we'll glue the two together to make a two-sided bookmark.

Today we used our CAFE/CRAFT board to break down our answers in language.  My favourite part of the CRAFT board this year has been "R" - Response to Text.  We've used this board all year as we built our own set of success criteria for reading responses.  The strategies were introduced early in the year, but we've referred to the board all year long.  (These will also become our reading strategies for the language part of the book mark).  I colour-coded each of the strategies, and then students had to hunt and indicate where they had checked / fixed / added them in their answers (using the correct colour to match the strategy).  Such a great visual for them!

Part of the reason why we had so much fun at school this week was our Angry Bird project.  We integrated our math and science units for this project, and we had a BLAST!  You can read all about it (and grab the link for the angry bird solids) in my blog post HERE.

Lastly, the construction at my school is at full steam (if full steam means REALLY LOUD!)  ;)  We're amalgamating with another school next year, and gaining three new classrooms - two of which have to be built (the amalgamation means much bigger class sizes.  The students are LOVING checking out the construction every day ... and I have to admit, the adults think it's pretty exciting, too.  :)

So, there's my week in review.  Hope you had a fabulous week!!!

Jen