Monday

I promised a student I'd type this first: There is no homework for tomorrow.

We went over six of our word parts:

ped is a weird one because it means two things--"foot" or "child"--Think centipede or pediatrician.

mort is a depressing one because it means "death" like the words mortal and immortal or mortician. Or rigor mortis.

carn is kind of gross because it means "flesh," meaning that if you're a carnivore, you're an eater of flesh. And that makes you kind of creepy.

psyche means "soul" or "mind"; a psychologist examines your mind and a psychic can read it.

ethno means "culture" or "race" like ethnicity.

And gen means "origin" like genesis, ingenuous, and genetics.

The students got their ISTEP work back from last Thursday. A lot of students did very very well, but I know we can do better. Because I'm a big nerd, I did some stat figurin':

82% got a 2 on the first question. 15% got a 1 and 3% got a 0. That's really good. I wish all the questions were answered that well!

Question two was the toughest--Only 33% got a 2 with 63% getting a 1. 4% got a 0.

Question three was kind of in between. There were about the same amount of 2's and 1's with 3% getting a 0.

Students need to work on quoting specific text to back up their ideas. Most of them read and understood; it's just a question of being more clear and specific with our answers.

We looked at the example answers the ISTEP people send us. My students, as always, are harsher graders than they are.

They also got their extended responses back. Those are graded with a 4-point rubric. 21% of my students scored a 4, 49% scored a 3, 25% scored a 2, and 5% got a 1. As I told the students, I'm a tougher grader than ISTEP with extended response.

I gave them another ISTEP writing--a 6-point rubric prompt about school changes. They had some time to work on it today, but they'll have to finish tomorrow.

One last note: I've got the Fever 1793 book reports in, and they really helped out some of the grades. I have some grades to put in the computer tonight, and then the grades should be accurate. As always, let me know if you have questions.