10.12.07

Wow! What a crazy, busy couple of weeks it has been! I apologize for not getting an update posted to my blog for the past few weeks – after planning lessons, making copies, having meetings, grading papers, helping kids, making power points, grading tests, etc, my blog just slipped my mind! J This is the last week of first quarter, and our last week to study Europe! The kids wrote some great country reports over the past few weeks, and made some really wonderful travel guides to go along with their countries. Such creative, hardworking kids we have at LP! This past Wednesday the students took the Europe Test, which is one of three assessment pieces for our Europe unit. The test, the country report, and the travel guide are the three formal assessment pieces for Europe. Many students did very well on the test, but I think that there were also a number of students that thought it would be easier than it was, and didn’t study as much as they should have. Please, please encourage your student to study! I have tried to make studying as simple and fun as possible. If you haven’t gotten onto the online review games yet, please check them out. They really are a lot of fun, and provide kids with instant feedback about how prepared they are for the test.  Our next unit of study is the giant continent of Asia! We will start out studying Northern Asia, and then move onto Southern Asia, Southwestern Asia, and Eastern Asia. This is the quarter that we do the big Kashmir Project, which allows the kids to use their critical thinking and cooperative learning skills to create a peace proposal for the conflicted Kashmir region between India and Pakistan. The Kashmir Project will take place during November. Thanks!