#schooltesting

Bring some humor to the classroom during standardized testing season with this "We Test At Dawn" frog t-shirt. Specifically designed for test day coordinators and teachers who need a laugh during proctoring. Choose your preferred shirt style and size on Zazzle. Perfect for grade-level teams!

Stressed out, over-scheduled, hurried: These words are often used to describe children these days.

With end of the year testing – and Spring Fever! – quickly approaching, let’s help our kids sharpen their skills when it comes to following directions.  Here are some great activities to do just that:

Learning to Follow Directions the Fun and Easy Way from Good Sensory Learning: Fun activities that you can do at home or stick in your weekly centers at school.

Monster Exchange:  In this project, classes of students draw monsters of their own creation and then describe them in writing. The compositions are exchanged, and students attempt to re-create the monsters, using the descriptions as their guides. Then they share the drawings and compare them to the originals.

My concerns here are teaching to the test, not allowing for creativity in the classroom and interactive learning experiences ; plus, we had OBE; now it's common core, which is actually very similar to OBE- it's not planned or thought out before  being implemented and if teachers don't buy into it, it won't work; No Child Left Behind set unrealistic goals as well, particularly for special needs children. In five years, it'll be something else; an inordinate amount of money is spent on writing new materials that could be spent directly in the schools.