Student News: May 13, 2005


by the Scholars of Room 208

This week we started the NWEAs. The NWEAs are tests that third and fourth graders take in Wells Elementary school. We take the tests on computers in the computer lab. The first day we did Reading. The second day we did Math and finally we are doing Writing. We do this assessment to see how are skills have improved since fall. The NWEAs are about an hour.

Another exciting thing is [that] we got some letters from people for our Podcast and we are going to read them on the podcast. We are putting these on the website because they give us feedback.

Also, Elaine L. Lindy has given us permission to read her stories on our Podcast. If you want to read some of her stories, visit her website at:

www.storiestogrowby.com

We think her stories will be very interesting.

Also, we have started learning a test-taking strategy called "SLAMS". SLAMS helps with answering test questions correctly. The first letter in SLAMS is "S". "S" stands for Sentence. Write you answer in complete sentences.

The next letter is "L". "L" stands for Lines. The number of lines on the test should judge how long your answer should be.

The letter after that is "A". "A" stands for Answer. Answer the question that the tests [actually] asks.

The following letter is "M". "M" stands for Mechanics. Capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar are all important.

The last letter is "S". "S" stands for Support. Always support your answer with details from the article.

The first thing we did to learn this is that we read a passage called, "The Nose Knows---Or Does It?" Then we learned one "focus letter" a day. We all do a little writing exercise, to get it into our minds.

SLAMS helps us remember the rules to do better on tests. It's a "memory gem."

Finally, in Library, we started creating Bibliographies for our research. Bibliographies are when you can get information from the book like the Author, when it was published, and where it was published. After we finished our Bibliography, we wrote down some note facts on articles and books for our Native American Research. We really had fun doing this. That's what we did in Library this week.

Posted: Fri - May 13, 2005 at 10:17 AM
         

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