I Loved that Lesson Linky!

I know that I have already posted today, but as I have been searching and exploring all day I am finding these great linkys which I am having a BALL with!!! :) Especially since school is over, I can't really post about things that I am doing in my classroom right now unfortunately. So...I happened to come upon this linky:

 and I thought I would give it a try. :) I posted this lesson already, so I feel as though I will share TWO ideas to make up for the fact that I have already shared this one:

Well, with all of our end of the year testing preparations we finnnaaallllyyyy got around to finishing our project based learning activity (PBL) on Blackbeard (part of NC history). The students had a BALL doing this! They were truly engaged (even on the last full day of school!!) the whole way through the assignment because they got to choose from a menu of choices and picked the one that matched their interest. For example, we had two groups choose to make the Queen Anne's Revenge;

We had some groups make board games:

 Other groups picked different choices. The students had such a great time finishing, and tomorrow on our LAST day of school we are doing our presentations! This PBL is available on my TPT STORE. If you're a NC teacher, this is a perfect activity! :). For those of you that leave a comment, I'll pick one of you at random by 6/20/2014 to get it for free!!!! :)

My SECOND thing that I did recently was all of our EOG Test (End of Grade) review.  I make it fun by calling it our EOG BOOT CAMP, because I really dislike teaching testing as a genre.  So, I paired them up with a partner close to their ability and let them complete different test prep activitiy packs.  This can be so....well, boring.  So, to make it more fun they got to work with a partner (using the RallyCoach structure by Kagan).  When they finished they got to compare answers with another group.  The goal was to catch mistakes and fix them.  I always tell them at this point it's not about being "wrong", it's about WHY you got it wrong and how to fix it.

While students are working on this, I pull my small differentiated groups and work on the skills that they need help with.  The last week before the EOG's I was able to spend the entire week doing guided math where the students rotated through centers of all of the concepts that they struggled with during the weeks of EOG BOOT CAMP. :)  It worked really well for me this year, and it made teaching "testing as a genre" a lot of fun!  The Blackbeard project was something that we worked on each day AFTER Boot Camp to have a fun "break" in our learning (secretly they were learning anyway---but they didn't think so. :)