Starting Out!

      The road behind my blog is fitting, for now.  I am just starting out into the crazy world of Blogging and selling on TPT!  In fact, I haven't even opened my store yet, deciding instead to start here.  So, what will it hold?  Only the BEST DAYS ahead will guide us to that!  Let's get started and see where we go.

      Our first road will be a freebee!  Yes, free stuff is good stuff.  This items that I am soon to upload into my newly created "store" will be my FCAT Test Specs Breakdown for 4th grade.  I had learned years ago that if you REALLY want to know what your students are being tested on, you should go through these with a fine toothed comb!  So I did!  It was enlightening and challenging all at once.  The only way I could truly process this information was to create a chart.  The chart follows the guidelines of how the test questions are formed-low, moderate, and high complexity.  It is very important to know that these complexities are how they ASK the question, how the complexity interacts with the question, NOT on how the child interacts with it.  I found this to be very enlightening.  I have to stop thinking about how the students interacts with the question, but how the question interacts with those around it.  This has lead me to a few different ways of thinking and creating, yet not always be "teaching" to the test.  Many of my posts will be just about that-how to still engage the students in learning but not wrap them up into the crazy world of high-stakes testing!

     So, now I have my overall goal-how to engage the students in learning but not wrap them up into the crazy world of high-stakes testing!  I love a challenge, and this is it, for now.  There is so much more to come onto the horizon for me.  We haven't even really started Common Core in my district (but some of us dabble without the invitation!)  So many BEST DAYS ahead!

Here's the link to my FIRST PRODUCT!