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Monday, May 16, 2011

STAR is over!

w00t! It's over! I know my students are super tired and cranky, but I kind of liked STAR week. I got 2 whole hours first thing in the school day to prep. Got. So. Much. Done. Seriously, we have to get this teacher work day going! Actual work: no meetings, no students, no nada except me, my brain, the curriculum, and my lesson creations.

Let's create something cool! Like this thing! What is it?

More than once this past week, I've had students and parents complain about how we didn't learn the entire curriculum before the STAR. No surprising, since we start on the waning days of August.

Well, I've remedied that - at least for next year. I used iCal to plan the entire 2011-2012 year of lesson pacing (terminology?) during STAR week, and I'm going to BOOK IT from August 29th up to spring break. The goal is to teach everything by spring break, leaving the time from early-mid-April to review for the STAR. This also means that I have to get through half of the curriculum before winter break in order to hold the semester final before students go on their 2-week brain drain.

After STAR, we'll do fun projects and games, I'll also assign homework packets to be turned in once a week rather than on a daily basis (yay! less paper work for me!). We'll spend the week after Memorial Day to review for the semester final and boom! Done!

2 comments:

Deb-chan here! ^-^/ said...

Great idea~!! ^o^/

Reminds me of all the fun we had in AP Calc after the AP test was over. We did oral reports on math-related topics of our own choosing (in pairs or groups of 3 to keep the stress down, and so we had 10-15 reports to watch instead of 30). Mine was the slide-rule!!! That thing is SO cool!!! XD I had no idea how awesome it was until the report... funnest report/project ever!!! \(^-^)/

bun2bon said...

I rearranged the pacing guide for next year and managed to have an extra 3 weeks (2 for work, and one for presentations) for the topics in math projects. now let's see if my plans will come true!