We can do it!

This week was our first round of ISTEP testing in third grade.  I'll be honest, this is a rough time of year.  Winter seems never ending in Indiana.  You know it has been cold when anything above 20 degrees feels like a heat wave.  There has been a nasty stomach bug going around.  Lots of students and staff have been out multiple days, including me because my own kiddos had it.  The stretch between Christmas and spring break is always a tough one.  A lot of learning happens, but we are all just looking forward to spring and some warmer weather.

We took round one of our testing this week.  The paper/pencil constructed response portion of the ISTEP is given in our classrooms.  Because of this we must cover any educational posters or information that students could potentially use to help them with the test.  So all anchor charts, posters, name tags, multiplication charts, number lines, etc. must be covered or taken down.  We pull out the yuckiest chart paper (don't want to waste the good stuff) we can find and staple it up to cover our beautiful, helpful walls.  Something about this depresses me.  I don't want to cover or tear down all of our learning.  We build those bulletin boards together all year and it is a colorful snapshot of all we have accomplished.

To help us stay positive, we talked about our goals for the year and made a bulletin board (since we had to cover it anyways) to keep us motivated.  Our slogan for this testing season is "We can do it!".  Our big goal for the year is to master the Indiana standards and pass our IREAD and ISTEP tests and I ask the students to set a couple of personal goals.  Some of them choose funny or silly goals, like eating a sandwich in one minute or beating a video game.  Many of them chose awesome goals like improving their grades or becoming a better person.

We spent some time reading about Rosie the riveter.  Then we took photos and drew pictures to help inspire us even more to do our best.  I have awesome students.  We can do it!