I do love blogs.

I know I haven't posted too much on here but I've been stalking foodie and textile blogs to get new ideas for my classroom and help my mentee! Also, I've been digging into Pinterest for new ideas (which often link to more blogs!). It's lead to experimentations in my kitchen, a dining room table filled with crafts every weekend and new books on my bookshelves. :)

In any case, this blogging thing is something I'm going integrate into my teaching next fall. In the past, students have been required to complete one home cooking assignment a month. It was a pencil and paper type thing. Why am I still allowing such an archaic practice to occur when students can more readily track their culinary adventures on the internet? And, why limit their opportunity to explore to just family recipes or cookbooks at their house? Well, I decided - NO MORE! I've decided that next year I'm going to have all of my Baking & Pastry students blog at least one time a month and either post a link/comments to other blogs they follow on our site. This way, they can try new recipes and share their adventures with their classmates! They can more readily critique their experience and tell their classmates what was great and not so great! I'm going to have to connect with kara and other blogger people to see how this works in the classroom. I want it to be as successful as possible so talking with those folks first might provide me with insight I hadn't already thought of!

Testing.... So much testing

It is quarter 4 and as an eighth grade teacher, I am starting to feel the pressure of state testing. I can also see the exhaustion that is it causing to each of my students. Eighth graders are taking their math, science and reading MCA's all during quarter 4 and that doesn't even include the MAP tests for math and reading which they will also be taking during quarter 4. My students will have some sort of state test almost every week for the remainder of the school year. While state tests are very important to measure a students growth and comparison, I feel they cause many students shut down and not work to their full potential if they are overwhelmed with tests week after week. I would like to pose the question: How much testing is too much? Do students benefit from taking multiple State tests during a quarter?