Week Eleven

This week was a lot more fun than last week. We had school spirit activities, and the students dressed up each day. There was a thuse on Friday to get all the students excited about the East-West Fairmont football game. Mrs. DeVault thinks that we should have thuses for academic events. I think that it would be great if we could spend some time getting students ready to take the WestTest or benchmarking exams. I know that they may not exactly be excited to take them but having fun activities could help to keep their spirits high. I remember simply being excited about getting to have a snack with the test in elementary school. Hopefully someone will come up with some activity to prepare students for the exams in the school.

I was really impressed with how well the students did on their poetry projects. They turned them in on Friday and I graded them over the weekend. The students had to complete six different types of poems, and they had to draw a picture to accompany each. Many of the projects were excellent and I could see that the students had spent a long time working on them. There were a few students who did not turn in the project at all and that is going to hurt their grade. They always have the option to turn in assignments one day late for half credit but none of the students chose to do this. The poetry projects are going to be recorded in the next nine weeks. We completed many assignments last week so the students are starting out the new nine weeks with a lot of points. I am really happy with how the poetry unit went these past few weeks. I know that it was hard for the students to get into some of the poems but they seemed to enjoy it immensely at times. I can see that they learned something about the importance of poetry from their own poems. They included a lot of personal emotions and experiences that cannot be conveyed as well in prose. I am hopeful that some of the students will continue to read and write poetry to have a deeper understanding of themselves.