A sweet birthday celebration on Monday. If you haven’t gotten the birthday scoop yet: a handful of photos (fine to continue the one for every year of the child’s life tradition, but no pressure), and treats for 21 (or 23 if you want to bribe the teachers).

MAP Growth testing this week. We take MAP tests twice a year, and they are designed to give teachers, students, and parents specific formative assessment data, so we can create academic goals particular to each student and individualize curriculum. For example, I will input student MAP scores into Khan Academy, and the website will automatically recommend certain content for the student to learn about and practice. I did an experiment with the fifth grade math students last spring in which we set goals together, spent a month or two practicing, then took the MAP test again. What we found was a direct relationship between amount of practice and growth achieved. That’s heartening for all of us evangelists of growth mindset!

The mistake we adults make is thinking of MAP as a summative standardized test, the kind that puts a number on a child that is used for admission to high school or college. It’s anything but that. The test gets harder or easier depending on how a student is performing, so the test is “just right” for a learner, wherever they happen to be. Students nevertheless get stressed about the idea, and we talk in depth about strategies for mitigating anxiety in such situations. We are doing our best to see and support these guys through thoughtful assessment, and the MAP Growth assessment is one small part of that big work.

Homework

Worldy  Wise: If the tech is still not happening, we will figure this out next week. Thanks for trying!

Island of the Blue Dolphins: read chapters four and five.

Math:

• 4th graders have a 2-sided worksheet due Friday.
• 5th graders have a packet due Friday. Please let me know if you can’t open the link: Dropbox, for some reason, took away the ability to provide public links to files (grumble).