Week Twenty-Four - Letters/Posters

This Week

This week was a short one! With a Plan E today and no school tomorrow, it's a wonder we got so much done. Students focused this week on revising their letters and refining their poster concepts. Ms. Reid planned an awesome critique for the students and some of our classes on Tuesday were combined so that students could work on posters and receive critique from their peers. The ideas are crystallizing now, and I'm happy to be able to share a few more (concrete) steps in the process from this week's critique:

Joel getting critiques on his poster idea from fellow students

Noah presenting his poster idea for critique

Upcoming Week

JCOWA Quiz Bowl is this upcoming Monday. I will have a substitute on Monday and our students will be at the University of Dayton competing (and hopefully winning again)! I want to go back to Washington DC again! For the rest of the week we will hopefully finish up our posters and letter revisions and (hopefully) send them to our US Representatives in the next week or two.

Obviously state testing is in the news a lot recently. While I'm glad to teach at a school that doesn't "teach to the test," I definitely understand the desire to want to prepare for it, especially since some of the topics are things that they will not have studied yet. The best way I've found to do this is to encourage students to take the online practice tests that the Ohio Department of Education puts out for students. If you go to this link from ODE you will be able to create an account in order to practice for all OGT tests using previous test questions. Or, you can simply click "Take a Test Without Logging In" and jump right into practice mode. The nice thing about the site is that it will tell you immediately what you got right/wrong, and why.

I'd recommend to students that they take all of the practice tests at least once, then focus practicing for the ones in which they're deficient. The answers are essentially just shuffled each year, so you can expect to see many of the same ones on the actual tests, which will take place starting on Tuesday, March 17th (Happy St. Patrick's Day!)

Lastly, one of the students (Marilyn) asked if they could dye my beard instead of shaving it if $1,000 is raised. I am also OK with this. In order to inspire the students, I have (poorly) photoshopped an image of myself to give a basic idea of what this could look like. I should note that my least favorite colors are purple and teal.

Is it?

We will likely have an unveiling event at the Wright State Educational Resource Center in the coming month or two, so be on the lookout for a date from me soon.

Have a great weekend!

~Mr. Grieve